rails_7 Published on  12 October 2022 12 October 2022 • 1 min read

Rails 7.1 adds the --parent option to the Job Generator

The Active Job framework allows the declaration of jobs and their execution on numerous queueing backends. Everything from regular clean-ups to billing charges, to mailers, can be included in these jobs. Basically, anything that can be divided up into small pieces and run in parallel.

Before Rails 7.1

Prior to Rails 7.1, adding new jobs with a superclass required manually creating the file and declaring the class.

Rails 7.1 onwards

The Active Job generator provides a --parent option using which we can create a job that inherits from a particular superclass. This is similar to the model generator's implementation of --parent. The following will create a job in the app/jobs directory with PaymentJob as its superclass:

$ rails g job stripe_process_payment --parent=payment_job

The --parent option also accepts the superclass name in CamelCase:

$ rails g job StripeProcessPaymentJob --parent=PaymentJob

Example:

  git:(master) ✗ rails g job stripe_process_payment --parent=payment_job
      invoke  test_unit
      create    test/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job_test.rb
      create  app/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job.rb

Which will generate the following code:

# app/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job.rb
class StripeProcessPaymentJob < PaymentJob
  queue_as :default
  def perform(*args)
    # Do something later
  end
end

1. Generate Jobs in sub-directories

   Using the namespace in the command, you can generate jobs in subdirectories.

   It can be written in the following two ways:

   $ rails g job stripe/process_payment --parent=payment_job
   

   $ rails g job Stripe::ProcessPaymentJob --parent=PaymentJob
   

     git:(master) ✗ rails g job stripe/process_payment --parent=payment_job
         invoke  test_unit
         create    test/jobs/stripe/process_payment_job_test.rb
         create  app/jobs/stripe/process_payment_job.rb
   

     class Stripe::ProcessPaymentJob < PaymentJob
       queue_as :default
   
       def perform(*args)
         # Do something later
       end
     end
   

2. Ignore the test file

   When we run the rails generator command, this also creates the test files. In case you want to ignore these files you can pass the flag --no-test-framework.

     git:(master) ✗ rails g job stripe_process_payment --parent=payment_job --no-test-framework
       create  app/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job.rb
   

3. Rollback

   Let's say to create the jobs you ran the command which adds the required files. But then realized you wanted to edit the file name. To undo this, simply run rails destroy command as below:

   rails d job StripeProcessPaymentJob or rails d job stripe_process_payment
   or rails d job stripe_process_payment.rb

     git:(master) ✗ rails d job StripeProcessPaymentJob
       invoke  test_unit
       remove    test/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job_test.rb
       remove  app/jobs/stripe_process_payment_job.rb
   

References

• Add --parent option to job generator to specify parent class of job