Leaker: The Best Way to Break MVC

Preface

Hide from your software engineering teacher (and from DHH as well) while you're reading this documentation.

Why?

The reason this plugin was written was to make AR's update_attributes to work seamlessly with a tagging system built on CouchDB.

The tags were saved with references to the User who created them, but unless we were using accepts_nested_attributes_for, there were no way to pass the current_user without adding an extra parameter.

So, because we were in an hacky mood, we implemented this plugin.. that shouldn't be used at all, but it's here because does interesting things extending Rails behaviours

Usage

You can leak any controller method to your models, via this simple DSL:

class FooController < ApplicationController
  leaks :some_method, :to => [SomeModel]
end

E.g., if you want to let the Tagging model know who the current_user is, but only when invoking a PostsController method you could write:

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  leaks :current_user, :to => [Tagging]
end

Or, if you really want to make the Cheerleader die, you could even write

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  leaks :current_user, :to => :all
end

And ALL ActiveRecord::Base instances and CouchRest::ExtendedDocument instances will have a current_user method available.

Installation

Beyond the scope of this document. You're breaking MVC, you should know how to install this evil code yourself.

Gems? No way!

Afterthoughts

You should really not use this code :-) You've been warned!