Rifinements or monkey patching rails 4

Question

I am using rail4 and ruby 2.0, I want to add a method in that should be available throughout my application, So i came across following 2 possibilities : 中添加方法 ，该方法应该在整个应用程序中都可用，因此遇到了以下两种可能性：

• Monkey Patch
• Refinement

I has successfully implemented the first approach just by creating an initializer "custom_model_error.rb"

class ActiveModel::Errors
  def first_error
    if !self.first
      return nil
    end
    data = Hash.new
    data['error_code'] = '900'
    data['message'] = self.first.join(' ')
    return data
  end
end

But when i tried to implement the second approach by defining a module in lib directory:

  module RefineErrors
    refine ActiveModel::Errors do
      def first_error
        if !self.first
          return nil
        end
        data = Hash.new
        data['error_code'] = '900'
        data['message'] = self.first.join(' ')
        return data
      end
    end
  end

and then using this module in ApplicationController:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
   using RefineErrors

i get the error . 。

Now my questions are:

? ？
Monkey Patching is generally not recommended, and refinements is the experimental feature of ruby 2.0

Also want to know ? 吗？

If there is any other approach that should be followed in this scenario, please mention that also.

Answer 1

If you are using ruby 2.0, you need to use patch of ruby which support refinements.take a look at here http://timelessrepo.com/refinements-in-ruby
This links also share the power of monkey patching and refinements.