Rails - Jan 2006 - Looping through all models in the application

Hello.

I have an application that depends on a table/model 
(ModelInternationalization) that provides international translations in 
various languages for all the model/table and columns names as well as 
some other stuff (whether the column is visible on forms, dropdowns, 
lists, reports etc).

I need to create a management interface for this translation stuff (the 
plaintext stuff, btw, will be handled by GetText). To do this, I need to 
loop through all the models in the application and check if they are 
present for the currently selected language in the translation model. 
Maybe some pseudocode would help clarify

for m in Application models
    <%= h m.model.name %>
end

Essentially, this would loop through all the models available to the 
application and just display it''s name. Ofcourse, the actually code is 
much more complex.

Is there a collection of the available models somewhere? Or do I need to 
goof it up and just parse the directory listing of the app/models 
directory? Or worse, create a table with just the names of the models 
and loop through that?

Regards,
Henning Pedersen

On 1/5/06, Henning Kilset Pedersen <henning@mopo.no>
wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I have an application that depends on a table/model
> (ModelInternationalization) that provides international translations in
> various languages for all the model/table and columns names as well as
> some other stuff (whether the column is visible on forms, dropdowns,
> lists, reports etc).
>
> I need to create a management interface for this translation stuff (the
> plaintext stuff, btw, will be handled by GetText). To do this, I need to
> loop through all the models in the application and check if they are
> present for the currently selected language in the translation model.
> Maybe some pseudocode would help clarify
>
> for m in Application models
>     <%= h m.model.name %>
> end
>
> Essentially, this would loop through all the models available to the
> application and just display it''s name. Ofcourse, the actually
code is
> much more complex.
>
> Is there a collection of the available models somewhere? Or do I need to
> goof it up and just parse the directory listing of the app/models
> directory? Or worse, create a table with just the names of the models
> and loop through that?
This is really ugly, but this will give you a list of all objects that
subclass from ActiveRecord::Base (which are all your models):

ObjectSpace.each_object do |object|
    if object.class == Class and object.superclass == ActiveRecord::Base
        puts object.to_s
    end
end

You''ll probably need to skip CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session
if you use ActiveRecordStore for your sessions.

- Jamie