ModestModel

Overview

Inspired by Crafting Rails Applications by Jose Valim, ModestModel provides an ActiveModel-compliant class that allows you to quickly create simple, table-less models. The intended use is to back interactions with external APIs with Ruby-friendly models rather than raw structured data (such as hashes).

Example

json = MyExternalApi.call('/some/path')
attributes_hash = JSON.decode(json)

# => {'name' => 'Michael', 'email' => '[email protected]'}

class SampleModel < ModestModel::Base
  attributes :name, :email
end

SampleModel.new(attributes_hash)

# => #<SampleModel @name="Michael"...

Installation

ModestModel has been tested and works on MRI 1.8.7 and 1.9.2.

Rubygems

gem install modest_model

Bundler

gem 'modest_model'

Usage

Similar to ActiveRecord models, simply create a class which inherits from ModestModel::Base, and define the attributes by calling the attributes method:

class SampleModel < ModestModel::Base
  attributes :name, :email
end

Features

ModestModel includes the following ActiveModel modules:

  • ActiveModel::Conversion
  • ActiveModel::Naming
  • ActiveModel::Translation
  • ActiveModel::Validations
  • ActiveModel::AttributeMethods

These allow your ModestModel models to act almost the same as an ActiveRecord model, but without the database. You can mass-assign attributes, add validations, add translations, and call familiar methods like model_name.human.

Please refer to chapter 2, Building Models with Active Model, from Crafting Rails Applications for an in-depth explanation of the inner workings of ModestModel.

Credits

This code has been derived from Crafting Rails Applications by Jose Valim, so all credit goes to Jose and Plataforma for granting permission to release this gem.