Thanks all for your answers. I've passed them all on. The magic_models thing seems to have him most excited.
"Imagine you get offered $5,000 to write a basic website/admin application on a legacy database that has 200 interconnected tables. You’ll need to add all the associations and validations based on the existing schema. Imagine how long that would take! 1 day? 1 week? more? Try 1 minute. The Magic Model Generator does all this for you automatically." This is pretty much where he is, apart from the luxurious budget apparently.I think he and I had a mis-communication over 'scaffolding'. David On Dec 8, 10:46 am, Martin Emde <[email protected]> wrote: > alias_attribute is another nice one if you're dealing with a nasty > schema. If you're so lucky as to be able to modify the schema as you > go then it will be cake. Even with a set schema or a shared DB it's > still easy. > > Something I wish someone would have told me about dealing with legacy > databases: build a simple wrapper app around it that serves json in a > more organized way and then say goodbye to the legacy schema. Only you > can decide if that's right for you though. > > Good luck, > > Martin > > / on my iPhone > > On Dec 8, 2009, at 9:42, David <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Hi all! This is one of those "I'm asking for a friend" type things. No > > really, I'm asking for a friend! > > > So he has this 'legacy' mySQL database and wants to build a new > > version of the site in Rails. > > > His desire is to get Rails to build scaffolds for him based on his > > database's schema. Without having to sit there and type out every > > table and every column in the script/generate scaffold command. > > > Naturally I laughed at him for a while. I've got no experience of > > dealing with legacy databases but told him that Rails wasn't really > > built for that. > > > Any suggestions? > > > Thanks > > David > > > -- > > SD Ruby mailing list > > [email protected] > >http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
