Specials

Since Rails 2.0 a default Rails application ships with a SQLite 3 database connection. You don't have to edit anything for this, but you need SQLite 3! If you would like to work with MySQL, Postgres or anything else, instead, you can create your application with this command:

rails -d mysql test_application

Then it's unavoidable to configure the database's host, user, password and name in the conf/database.yml file of your application. If you've generated the application with the "-d mysql" flag, as described above there should be a sample of the database.yml in your project, already.

But as long, as you don't have db server installed locally already, we encourage you to stick with the SQLite default, whose installation is described below.

Let's create our first model!

script/generate model car

This should generate some files. Right now only two are important for us: db/migrate/001_create_cars.rb and app/models/car.rb .

The first one is a so called "migration". We will use it to define the table, that represents objects of our new model in the database. So open it up. It should look like this:

class CreateCars < ActiveRecord::Migration

def self.up

create_table :cars do |t|

t.timestamps

end

end

def self.down

drop_table :cars

end

end

There are two methods in this file. The self.up and the self.down method. The up method is called when you would like to migrate your database schema to a higher version. The down method is called, when you would like to revert changes and so migrate your db schema to a lower version. In this case the down method just drops the database, while the up method created the database in line 3. So we need to define which columns we need and what type they are. For our little testing we would like to store three informations in the database, the name of the brand as a string, the top speed and if it has an automatic gearbox or not. So we change the up method, that it looks like that:

def self.up

create_table :cars do |t|

t.string :brand_name

t.integer :top_speed

t.boolean :automatic

t.timestamps

end

end

This will create three columns, named "brand_name", "top_speed" and "automatic". Which type these columns will be in the database is not easy to say. It depends on the db you use and it doesn't matter for us! All we need to know is, that we can use brand_name as a string, top_speed as a non-floating-point number (integer) and automatic as a boolean value. The t.timestamps line is a shortcut which is available since Rails 2.0. It actually creates two extra columns in the database, named "created_at" and "updated_at". Rails is clever and fills those columns, when they are there. So when you create a new object of this model the current time and date will be saved as the created_at value of the object. And whenever you update it, this time and date will be saved as the updated_at value. As you can also see, the name of the table will be "cars". Don't change this! The model relies on THIS name. You can tell it, that it should use another table, but this is inconvenient! Just follow the simple rule: model named with a singular word and the corresponding table is the plural form of this word. And yesssss, Rails knows about some irregular plural forms. If you create a model named "man", the corresponding migration will create a table named "men". And if Rails doesn't know a irregular form, you would like to use, it's possible to add new ones. But you'll have to lookup this one on your own, when you need it.

Now let's tell our db about the changes we would like to make. Go to the root directory of your application and then do this:

rake db:migrate

Now your database should contain the new table. Let's test it with the Rails console. The Rails console is a wonderful tool to explore the power of Ruby and Rails on-the-fly! Just go to your application's root, again and type:

script/console

After it loaded up, you can interact with your Rails application! Just type this:

my_car = Car.create!(:brand_name => 'Volvo', :automatic => true, :top_speed => 150)

If this isn't creating a total mayhem on the console but rather displays something like that:

=> #

you've successfully created your first instance of the Car model! You can try this in the console:

puts my_car.top_speed

This will print out the top speed of the car and should look like this:

>> puts my_car.top_speed
150
=> nil

Cool, seems to work. Now let's try to get this car back from the database. If you're tending to be somehow paranoid, you can close and reopen the Rails console to see, that we're using no tricks ;) Then type this in the console:

another_car = Car.find(:first)
puts another_car.top_speed

This should print 150 like this:

150
=> nil

Great! Everything is working. Unfortunately this got to long, to show you how to do the authentication in this episode. But watch out for the article in the next week, which should give you an introduction to that. So long have fun with your new knowledge and play around with the test application as much as you can. If you're stuck just ask Google, it's able to help you with most of the troubles, you will encounter.

Thanks for your attention,

Thorben