跟踪大型Rails应用程序流的最佳实践是什么？

Question

If you are a new developer to a large (very large!) rails app it can be really difficult to trace through the flow of what is calling what, where a method is defined, and how to 'grok' how the whole thing works.

What are best practices for how to find information like:

I'm in class Foo and it calls a method bar but there is no def bar in the file. It must be mixed in or a concern or monkey patched etc. in somehow. What are steps 1, 2, 3 for where to look? I don't see anything obvious at the top of the file and greping for 'def bar' doesn't return anything.

Answer 1

Metaprogramming! Probably defined the methods on the fly based on the params passed. Ex. define_method

Answer 2

I would go with

grep "def bar" app/* lib/* -irn (optionally -l)

If I'm in the file open, I most likely would use cscope , because I use vim, but if you are using an IDE it might help you somehow to find this method.

Or yet, I could simply use the debugger , where you can inspect your objects in runtime.