How to use Dynamic Object invocation in Rails for Models (String to Model conversion)

Requirement
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You have String value of the model (model name) and you want to dynamically invoke methods on this model. This comes handy when you want to parse controller/action and do some neat nifty tricks.


Solution
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model_name = "invoice"

model_name_capital = model_name.capitalize # => this creates "Invoice"

@object = Object.const_get(model_name).find(:all) # => This is equivalent to Invoice.find_all

Ruby 4 Lines of Web service/SOAP Code Magic

This is amazing to see how easy and simple it is to write a SOAP code in ruby, have a look at the following code. This does call Google search engine by passing some random search query.

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'
factory = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new("http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl")
service = factory.create_rpc_driver
@service_output = service.doGoogleSearch("xxxxxxxxxxxxxx", "Ajuby", 0, 10, "false", "", "false", "", "latin1", "latin1")

That's it.. @service_output returns what I call it as "Ruby's intelligent data structure" which you can use to get respective data output

e.g.
- Results: <%=@service_output.estimatedTotalResultsCount%>
- searchTime: <%=@service_output.searchTime%>


Note: Above "xxxxxxxxxxxxx" is the api key that you need to obtain from Google to use their web services, its less than a minute job to get that from google.

Now there is a better and more modular way of writing above code using ActionWebService
where you can manage API's to access outgoing SOAP calls more effectively.