Hi Scott, So it sounds like your question is two parts: first, generating the slugs themselves, and second, updating all the existing records.
As to the first, there are plenty of plugins and strategies for generating the slugs. Perhaps you've already got that taken care of. I personally wouldn't use a plugin for this – the logic is just too simple for me to want to hide it away. A before_create to call an instance method that invokes SecureRandom.hex is about as complicated as it needs to be. Just make sure you have a simple test for uniqueness :) Whether or not you call that from a Rake task, or in a loop directly after the migration that adds the column, is up to you. I would personally lean toward updating the existing records in the migration itself. And, speaking of the migration, do remember that you'll want to index your table on the new column. This all might be a bit more succinctly expressed in code: http://gist.github.com/265675 All of this to say, I suppose, that I don't have any particularly better suggestion. My suggestions here are basically just iterative on what it sounds like you're already doing. -- Nick Zadrozny -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
