I faced a situation where I’m working on a legacy project, that project was a normal ruby on rails project, with controllers, models, decorators, concerns, but with the long life of the project and turnover of the developers, inconsistency was introduced everywhere.
One of the places where consistency were violated was the concerns directories, where concerns names were not the same, some of them are suffixed with Concern suffix, and others were not.
That refactoring was pretty simple on it’s own, you only need to rename, concerns files to the proper naming, rename the concerns modules themselves, and also any usage for these modules.
The problem is that we don’t just want to have that naming convention for the current concerns but we also need to inforce it for any future concerns, so we’re trying to make it impossible to break that rule again.
My approach is using the usual testing framework in place, as we use Rspec I just added a test suit for ActiveSupport::Concern where I get all concerns files and make sure all of them are meeting the criteria.
And the following code snippet is the final result
1Rspec.describe ActiveSupport::Concern do
2 files_paths = Rails.root.join('app', 'controllers', 'concerns', '**', '*.rb')
3 files = Dir.glob(files_paths)
4
5 files.each do |file|
6 describe file do
7 it "must end with concern" do
8 expect(file).to end_with('_concern.rb')
9 end
10 end
11 end
12end
this snippet will get all ruby files in app/controllers/concerns and make sure all of them meets the naming convention.
The same technique could be applied to app/decorators if you’re using Drapper gem and want to make sure the naming is not violated, or the inheritance is maintained for all decorators.
it can be applied to basically any rule you need to keep in your project lifetime.
That doesn’t just prevent people from breaking the design decision you took for that project, but it’s also for you as over time you’ll forget the decisions you’ve made and that’s a safety net for you.
along with that technique I also document the rules I decided for each directory in the project in a README.md file inside the corresponding directory, and I link to it from the root README.md file, that makes it mode visible for contributors.