Using class function from the lib directory in rails

I am creating a rails3 application and I want to create a class that handles string formatting, so I made a class called FormatUtilites.rb in the lib d开发者_高级运维irectory but whenever I try calling it from somewhere else in my app I get this error:

ActionView::Template::Error (uninitialized constant ActionView::CompiledTemplates::FormatUtilities)

So it thinks its a constant and not a class method, which is how it is defined. Any ideas?

class FormatUtilities

  def self.slugify(name)
    name.downcase.gsub(/\s|\W|\D/, "")
  end

end

Thanks!

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Turns out rails3 stop autoloading the lib directory. I have no idea why they did it, but they did. Just needed to add it to the autoload in the application.rb

thanks anyways!

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Classes are constants in Ruby, besides also being classes. Probably you just need to do "require format_utilities"

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You need to add:

# in config/application.rb
config.autoload_paths = %W(#{config.root}/lib

The name of your file should be format_utilities.rb for autoload to work.

In your particular case i would use a different aproach. Instead of creating a class with static functions i would create a module named FormattingHelper in app/helpers/formatting_helper.rb like this.

class FormattingHelper
  def slugify(name)
    name.downcase.gsub(/\s|\W|\D/, "")
  end
end

Then in ApplcationController or in a specific controller i would add:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper :formatting
end

---

If you want rails to automatically load this file when it boots, you will need to name your file format_utilities.rb. The next time you restart your server or console, you should be able to do FormatUtilities.slugify("name")