Rails unorthodox naming of models with abbreviations

Question

In an application I am building I am storing an XML file in my database using the acts_as_tree association. I would like to name the class XMLElement but this throws rails off since the capitalization is non-standard. It is looking for XMLElement from the file name xml_element.rb. I tried changing the filename to x_m_l_element.rb to try and trick it into thinking that "XML" was really two words, but this didn't work either. Should I just suck it up and use the name XmlElement instead of the more ideal XMLElement, or is there a better way around this issue?

Answer 1

Add the following to config/initializers/inflections.rb.

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
  inflect.acronym 'XML'
end

Now running $ rails g model XMLElement… will create a class named XMLElement in a file named xml_element.rb and an associated table xml_elements.