Troubles with Rails 3 and classes in nested directories - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I have a rails project that I inherited. I'm working on upgrading it from rails 2 to rails 3. I'm at 3.0.15 right now, working my way up to 3.2. In the app directory there is a support folder with classes in it. Like so:
app/
support/
sweeper.rb
grouped_list/
item.rb
list.rb
item.rb looks like this:
class Support::GroupedList::Item
attr_accessor :name, :count, :link
def initialize(name, count, link)
#name = name
#count = count
#link = link
end
end
In one of the controllers the Items class is called like this:
Support::GroupedList::Item.new name, count, link
when I try and load a page I get the error:
uninitialized constant ApplicationController::Support
My first thought was that the paths where not in the autoload so I added
config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/support #{config.root}/app/support/grouped_list)
in my application.rb but that didn't change anything. After looking around for examples I found that people where creating empty module in their directory structure so I created a support.rb file in the support folder that looks like this:
module Support
end
Now my error changes to
uninitialized constant Support::GroupedList
Hey! That's interesting, I don't understand why it changed but its progress right? So I add a grouped_list.rb file in the grouped_list directory. It looks like this:
module Support::GroupedList
end
But then I get
Expected ***/app/support/grouped_list/grouped_list.rb to define GroupedList
Ugh! so I change it to:
module GroupedList
end
But then I'm back to:
uninitialized constant Support::GroupedList
So clearly there is some fundamental knowledge I'm missing about loading classes in modules. This structure worked in rails 2 but breaks in rails 3.0.15. I'd really like to understand so if anyone can help me out I'd really appreciate it.

Answer 1

class GroupedList::Item
attr_accessor :name, :count, :link
def initialize(name, count, link)
#name = name
#count = count
#link = link
end
end
This should work. Then in your controller:
GroupedList::Item.new name, count, link
Also remember to restart your rails server/console, after you make these changes.