Autopopulater

A Rails gem that enables automatic population of model attributes via remote APIs or custom methods.

Autopopulater provides a simple way to automatically populate your Rails model attributes when a record is created. It supports various ways to fetch the data, including:

• External API calls
• Custom methods
• Lambda functions
• Hash or object responses

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "autopopulater"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install autopopulater

The gem provides an autopopulates method that you can use in your models to specify which attributes should be automatically populated and how.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  autopopulates :name, :email, with: ->(user) { UserApiClient.fetch(user) }
end

autopopulates :name, :email, with: ->(user) { UserApiClient.fetch(user) }

autopopulates :name, :email, with: ->(user) { OpenStruct.new(name: 'David', email: 'email@example.com') }

autopopulates :name, :email, with: ->(user) { { name: 'David', email: 'email@example.com' } }

autopopulates :email, with: ->(user) { 'email@example.com' }

autopopulates :name, with: :name_from_api

def name_from_api
  'David'
end

autopopulates :name

def fetch_name
  'David'
end

• Automatically populates attributes on record creation
• Supports multiple attributes at once
• Flexible data source options (API, methods, lambdas)
• Skips population if attributes are already set
• Can be disabled per record using autopopulated: false
• Supports overwriting existing values with autopopulate_attributes(overwrite: true)

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/dvanderbeek/autopopulater.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.