array of all ActiveRecord models in a rails app

June 14th, 2008
Posted by David Lowenfels
Filed in:
ActiveRecord

I recently needed to iterate over all the ActiveRecord models in the rake factory:generate task for factories-and-workers.

I originally tried to iterate over Object.constants (like John Philip Green’s find_invalid rake task) but that seemed a bit clunky to me, and didn’t really work for my purposes.

Here’s how I did it: 

  all_models = Dir.glob( File.join( RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'models', '*.rb') ).map{|path| path[/.+\/(.+).rb/,1] }
  AR_models = all_model_names.select{|m| m.classify.constantize < ActiveRecord::Base}
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