Ruby on Rails with Repository Pattern?
After working with ASP.Net MVC, it has me thinking about Rails. I worked with Rails prior, but am a little rusty. ASP.Net MVC tutorials recomment hiding data layer implementation with the repository pattern. This allows easiesr Dependency Injection for Unit Testing, and nice decoupling of the controller from the model implementation.
I remember Rails’ controllers using Active Record objects directly, and unit tests using test databases that could be setup and torn down with ease. That solves the need to swap out for unit testing, but still it seems like a bad idea to have so much ActiveRecord code exposed in the controller.
So my question is, what is the latest best practice here? Are real (not mocked) databases still used for unit testing? Do Rails developers call ActiveRecord directly, or an abstraction?
Answer
My experience has been that Ruby on Rails integrates ActiveRecord so tightly (in most cases, it can become nearly completely transparent) that developers often use it without any Abstraction.
The thing to remember is that the Repository pattern and the Active Record pattern were both suggested in Patterns of Enterprise Architecture by Martin Fowler (which, if you haven't read it yet...you should). Active Record is tightly integrated in Rails. Microsoft .NET doens't tie you to a pattern...so the Repository pattern was adopted by the majority of the developers.