Forcing rails to autoload class

Question

I have several small classes that are in a single file in /app/models, similar to:

# /app/models/little_class.rb
class LittleClass; ...do stuff; end;
class AnotherLittleClass; ...do stuff; end;

Rails only seems geared to autoload classes in files reflecting the class name. So referencing AnotherLittleClass outside of the file raises "unitialized constant" errors as below until LittleClass is referenced:

irb(main):001:0> AnotherLittleClass 
NameError: uninitialized constant AnotherLittleClass
irb(main):02:0> LittleClass
=> LittleClass
irb(main):03:0> AnotherLittleClass
=> LittleClass2

It would be a pain and messy to split them into individual files. Is there a way to autoload these classes, so referencing AnotherLittleClass without LittleClass doesnt raise an error?

Answer 1

You could put them into a module and use them within this namespace SomeLittleClasses::LittleClass.do_something

# /app/models/some_little_classes.rb
module SomeLittleClasses

  class LittleClass
    def self.do_something
      "Hello World!"
    end
  end

  class AnotherLittleClass
    def self.do_something
      "Hello World!"
    end
  end

end