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Dynamically adding routes from your engine plugins

At Cohesive FT I am developing a sort of webmin console that has drop-in pluggable components. I am using the RoR plugin system with the engines plugin to drop entire chunks of MVC infrastructure into my application as required. This is all well and good except that rails engines require you to add this line into your routes.rb:

map.from_plugin :your_plugin_name

Now since I want a truly plug-n-play system, I can’t be modifying the route file of my main application. So here is a quick solution to import all the routes (note that in engine-plugin style you do not use the “map.” prefix for your routes, so I am adding that in)


#--routes.rb of the main applicatoin--
Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/*"].each do |plugin|
File.open(”#{plugin}/routes.rb”).each do |line|
eval “map.#{line}”
end
end


That’s all folks!

Why not try this?

Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/*"].each do |plugin_dir|
map.from_plugin(File.basename(plugin_dir))
end

.. it should work, and using the API should protect you against any changes to the way that plugin routes are implemented. Ideally you’d be able to run

Rails.plugins.each do |plugin|
map.from_plugin(plugin.name)
end

but this will only work if you *aren’t* using the

config.plugins = %w(engines *)

loading style, since all other plugins will be loaded during the “after_initialize” hook and so won’t be present in Rails.plugins.

HTH,

James

Good point James, I think I overhacked the solution on this one. Will try your method.

I didn’t know about Rails.plugins..that’s pretty nice. But in actuality what I didn’t show in my code is that PLUGINS is a special list of plugins that I have prefiltered since they are the application specific dropins rather than any old plugin that might exist.

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