ruby on rails - How to implement a singleton model

Question

I have a site in rails and want to have site-wide settings. One part of my app can notify the admin by SMS if a specific event happens. This is an example of a feature that I want configurable via the site-wide settings.

So I was thinking I should have a Setting model or something. It needs to be a model because I want to be able to has_many :contacts for the SMS notification.

The problem is that there can only be one post in the database for the settings model. So I was thinking of using a Singleton model but that only prevents new object to be created right?

Would I still need to create getter and setter methods for each attribute like so:

def self.attribute=(param)
  Model.first.attribute = param
end

def self.attribute
  Model.first.attribute
end

Is it perhaps not best-practice to use Model.attribute directly but always create an instance of it and use that?

What should I do here?

Answer 1

(I agree with @user43685 and disagree with @Derek P -- there are lots of good reasons to keep site-wide data in the database instead of a yaml file. For example: your settings will be available on all web servers (if you have multiple web servers); changes to your settings will be ACID; you don't have to spend time implementing a YAML wrapper etc. etc.)

In rails, this is easy enough to implement, you just have to remember that your model should be a "singleton" in database terms, not in ruby object terms.

The easiest way to implement this is:

1. Add a new model, with one column for each property you need
2. Add a special column called "singleton_guard", and validate that it is always equal to "0", and mark it as unique (this will enforce that there is only one row in the database for this table)
3. Add a static helper method to the model class to load the singleton row

So the migration should look something like this:

create_table :app_settings do |t|
  t.integer  :singleton_guard
  t.datetime :config_property1
  t.datetime :config_property2
  ...

  t.timestamps
end
add_index(:app_settings, :singleton_guard, :unique => true)

And the model class should look something like this:

class AppSettings < ActiveRecord::Base
  # The "singleton_guard" column is a unique column which must always be set to '0'
  # This ensures that only one AppSettings row is created
  validates_inclusion_of :singleton_guard, :in => [0]

  def self.instance
    # there will be only one row, and its ID must be '1'
    begin
      find(1)
    rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
      # slight race condition here, but it will only happen once
      row = AppSettings.new
      row.singleton_guard = 0
      row.save!
      row
    end
  end
end

In Rails >= 3.2.1 you should be able to replace the body of the "instance" getter with a call to "first_or_create!" like so:

def self.instance
  first_or_create!(singleton_guard: 0)
end