Hi guys I'm about to start work on a project that's more than a little ambitious (for me) and I wanted to get someone's opinion on some ways to go about this. Background: where I work, we tend to have a lot of 'one-use' data like lists of users, directories, LDAP OUs and just about anything else you can imagine. When we have to do some sort of processing of this data (e.g. files than need to be renamed or machines that need to be sorted and uniq'd), most people tend to create an excel worksheet and manually enter all the data they require after which they will pass the spreadsheet to someone else who will manually then process the data in excel. I don't know if I'm the only one that can see the irony in all this (maybe I just have a problem) but to me this seems more than a little ridiculous. I use excel sometimes but most of the time I see the concept as a little outdated. I hate VBA and refuse to use it and without that excel to me is the same product it was when it was written. I am not a programmer but I use Ruby heavily for data processing and automation and with Ruby and Textmate, I am always amazed at what I can do (as well as the many Unix tools available). I have written a few quickie rails projects purely for data processing (it's cheap and easy) but there is obviously more overhead than creating an excel spreadsheet (although in the long run that hardly matters). So I would like to create a rails application that will let me create quickie DBs (ala DabbleDB, although not quite so extensive). I have a pretty good idea of how to go about all the UI stuff (God bless the jQuery folk) but the architecture of it is less than simple. I thought about having individual tables for each DB (messy but quite workable) but having a ActiveRecord controller for each one makes me shudder. Having several hundred files (eventually) sitting in my rails app just says wrong. I could ignore AR and do the queries directly or better yet create a sort of metaclass that handles individual instances of DB's without having multiple controllers. But this starts to get pretty hairy.
Does anyone have any ideas, suggestions, warnings, etc? Am I wishing for the moon? Sven --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
