On 11 January 2012 23:44, Dylan Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm sorry if these are very simple questions, I just haven't been able > to find useful answers for my problems. > > I've been programming in Ruby for a couple years, and recently started > with Rails (having felt most of Ruby seems to be in that direction, > these days), so I have a reasonable amount of knowledge in ruby > scripting but know very little about how to get Rails to do my bidding. > > So far I've followed a couple "create a blog" tutorials, and have gained > a few steps in the right direction, but I still have a few issues. > > The server that hosts my applications only runs Rails version 2.3.14, so > please try to keep any code/suggestions compatible. > > What I would like, in my project, is for there to be two input fields: > "subject" and "keywords". One subject can have multiple (limited; maybe > up to 7? doesn't really matter) keywords, which will be found in the > "keywords" field and delimited by commas. > > Obviously in ruby it would be a simple keywords.split(','). > > Each keyword (after being split) will also have a few attributes which > are entirely ruby-defined. Suppose they're length and number of vowels. > Basically things that I want stored in the database which aren't > strictly input by a user. > > As far as I know, the first steps in Rails to set up my database would > be to use the following commands: > > ruby script/generate scaffold search subject:string words:text > > ruby script/generate scaffold keyword word:string length:integer > vowels:integer search:references > > (and then I would add the "has_many" to search and "belongs_to" to > keyword). > > And basically all the app needs to do, after, is display all of the > previous subject words, and for each post each keyword and its > attributes (length, etc.). > > But every tutorial I can find tends to deal with inserting user input to > the database, rather than inserting the output of Ruby scripts. > > That looks like it should set things up for me, but the real questions > I'm facing are: > 1) How do I add a variable number of things (keywords) to the database > from within Rails?
In the controller parse the string and loop round, creating the new objects and saving them one at a time. > 2) How do I store entirely-ruby-determined attributes like a string's > length? Don't store values that can be re-calculated, such as the string's length in the database unless efficiency becomes an issue. Add member methods to the model to return the calculated values then in the future if you really need to then you can add the attributes to the database. Almost always the bottlenecks in an app will not be in the places you initially imagine them to be. If you did want to store these values though then you could use a before_filter to calculate them when the record is created or updated. Colin > > ---------------- > My current ideas: > > The Active Record section in the Rails API > (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html) gives me a > start. > It looks like I might be able to perform the split in the "words" model > and use a small loop that has something like the following in it: > new_word = Keyword.new(word=in_words[i], length=in_words[i].length, > vowels=in_words[i].vowels) > > Would that be appropriate? How would I (or even, should I for something > small like this without much searching, just parsing and displaying) set > the reference foreign key to the current "Search"? > > Sorry for such a long post about a simple question, and thank you for > having the patience to read through it! > -Dylan > > -- > 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. > -- gplus.to/clanlaw -- 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.
