Heinz Strunk wrote: > Hey people, > > I'm starting a new project and just finished creating the ERM diagram > with about 30 tables. There are quite some tables with foreign keys so > I'm not sure how to start creating the controllers/models. > How should I start creating controllers/models? Should I first create > all tables without foreign key? Should I just start somewhere and add > them radomly?
Identify all the has_many and has_one associations from your diagram; set up your foreign keys as per the rails naming conventions (eg table 'users' id primary key maps to 'user_id' field in another table - that sort of thing). Some people will also put in foreign key constraints too - especially if the system is being updated outside of rails. You may also have things like 'has_many :through' for many-to-many relationships; and other more advance things I won't mention here. By mapping out the has_* assocations, you will also know pretty much most of your belongs_to associations by extension. Then script/generate your AR models and wire them up with their associations. Migrate the development database; clone the test database from the development database. I'd then head over to test/unit[1] and test/fixtures and start testing your models: create some test data in test/fixtures and flesh out what business/app logic they are going to encapsulate. <soapbox subject="testing" > Sounds like you're newish to rails so doing stuff test first will be hard. However, it's a great way to actually use, refine and play with what you're building and the most straight forward part of rails to test because you don't have to worry about http, redirects, templates etc If you know your models are rock solid, then that's one less thing to worry about when you are dealing with your controllers and templates. </soapbox> [1] Seems like a lot of people are using rspec now; I'm just referring here to the older test unit framework that is still the default in rails > I'm also not sure which table should become a controller and which one > only a model. How should I decide that? If there's no real 'rule' to > decide this... could I just create all of them as a model and if I need > one to be a controller I just create the same on as a controller without > overwriting the model.rb? Don't know what you mean by all of this. Controllers are there to handle all the http stuff: what template to render, what http status code to return to the browser, sending messages to your models, how to handle exceptions from the models or elsewhere etc... HTH, if you're new to rails read some tutorials or get the rails book. -- Daniel Bush -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" 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/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
