Rails Best Practices

Bad Smell

# == Schema Information
#  address_city        :string(255)
#  address_street      :string(255)
class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
  def address_close_to?(other_customer)
    address_city == other_cutomer.address_city
  end

  def address_equal(other_customer)
    address_street == other_customer.address_street &&
      address_city == other_customer.address_city
  end
end

You can see that a Customer model has two properties address_city and address_street, but address_city and address_street should be the property in Address class. If you don't want to create a addresses table, you can just create a composed class Address.

Refactor

class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
  composed_of :address, :mapping => [ %w(address_street street), %w(address_city city)]
end

class Address
  attr_reader :street, :city

  def initialize(street, city)
    @street, @city = street, city
  end

  def close_to?(other_address)
    city == other_address.city
  end

  def ==(other_address)
    city == other_address.city && street == other_address.street
  end
end

Rails provides a helper method composed_of to make it easy to extract a composed class. Here we add a composed class Address to the model Customer, in Address model we use property street and city and in Customer model they are corresponding to address_street and address_city. Each property goes to its own class.