I'm new in Ruby on Rails, I'm wondering, is there a user interface to see all the data that you have in your Active Record Models and manipulate them just like PhpMyAdmin?
Sadly no - you have to write that interface yourself... :)
There are ways to quickly scaffold up an interface for each of your models. Look at doco on rails generate scaffold for more info.
There are also gems that will automate some admin-scaffolding for you:
Look at eg ActiveAdmin
But in practice nobody keeps either of these around for long in their projects (for various reasons).
If you're new to Rails, I can highly recommend reading your way through the Rails Guides here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org It will help you level up in all the fundamental aspects of Rails :)
There are gems in rails to maintain tables in rails app:
ActiveAdmin: It provides admin panel using which you can add/update/delete any record under tables.
rails_db_info: Just and it under Gemfile and run bundle install. Go to "/rails/info/db" link, it will list all tables with schema details. Its very easy to integrate.
Related
Are there some tools like CMS or UI-level frameworks that help in the maintenance and development of the UI layer within Ruby architectures?
I am still learning Ruby but as I understand it, it is very coupled with the front-end, correct?
Thanks,
Alex
You can use active_scaffold to get ajaxified crud interface and it can get integrated inside your existing rails app easily.
github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold/wiki/Getting-Started
You can also use hobo but from I have gathered you need to use it right from the beginning as its generator creates the app.
hobocentral.net/
You can use comatose cms for integrating a basic content management functionality in your existing ror app.
comatose.rubyforge.org/getting-started-01.html
Also if you are looking for something pre-packed with rails then you can use command:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
Command above is specific for rails 3 (in previous version scaffolding was available via ruby script/generate scaffold).
guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#getting-up-and-running-quickly-with-scaffolding
Hope this helps.
Are there some tools like CMS or UI-level frameworks that help in the maintenance and development of the UI layer within Ruby architectures?
CMS and UI level frameworks are very broad categories that you are talking about. Just to get you started, I will list down some I started with
Nifty-generators
blueprint-css
jquery-rails
I am still learning Ruby but as I understand it, it is very coupled with the front-end, correct?
No, its not very coupled with the front end as you think it is. You can assume Rails(Ruby) as just the back-end that will just send back data and when data has arrived at front-end, its your wish how to present it, format it or whatever you want to do with it.
I created, using the scaffolding, a model and controller files.
Later I discovered it would be a good idea to create the tables in the DB first...
My question, How can I role back the generated files and regenerate them now, that I have the tables in the DB?
I just started learning RoR, so right now I am not interested in best practices, just learning the tool box this FW (RoR) comes with.
And, do you have a recommendation for a good tutorial? I do know to use google, it is just that search engines don't know, yet (working on that), how to grade tutorials.
Edit: For my last question I found Learning Ruby on Rails
try
rails destroy scaffold XXXXX
one thing that I find puzzling though is that you said "Later I discovered it would be a good idea to create the tables in the DB first..."
Well, rails creates a migration file for you when you run the generator in the first place, and this file will create your DB tables and fields when you run it using rake db:migrate
PS - here's a few good tutorials for you:
rails tutorial ebook
rails demo site
rails 4 zombies
You can rollback controller.
rails destroy controller [controller]
You can delete all the files Rails created -- just look at the printout on your command line, see what files rails created, and delete them.
I don't know why you would want to create all the tables in the db, but that's fine, I guess. I prefer to let rails do it. Either way, Rails won't mind. You can always add / change fields using Rails, even if you created the tables outside Rails.
Ryan Bates' Railscasts are excellent tutorials.
In Symfony i just have to create models with ORM Designer and export it to symfony as a schema.yml and then use a symfony command to create tables, models and forms.
I wonder if there is an equivalent to the RoR so that you dont have to create models manually by hand?
It saves a lot of time using GUI for this kind of tasks and it is less error-prone.
thanks
it should be possible to support RoR in ORM Designer. The trouble is that we know only PHP and wouldn't be able to beta test RoR support and create unit tests. But if there is anybody willing to help, please let us know at support at orm-designer dot com and RoR support can be released within a few months.
You can use the model generator with script/generate model to create a model class and migration. A great reference on migrations is cheat migrations which is available via the cheat command.
You could use the scaffold generator as per Getting Started with Rails, however scaffolds are "considered harmful" by many (including myself). I prefer to generate an initial migration with script/generate migration, tweak it to suit and then create/update my model, routes, controllers and views manually.
If you are still starting out, you will probably find it helpful to run through Getting Started with Rails at least once.
Is there a pattern or a gem (Ruby on rails) for modeling the wiki-like behaviour of a StackOverflow like web site?
I'm working on Ruby-on-Rails project so a gem or something in RoR would be appreciated but a well defined pattern is just as good.
Thanks
Did you try act_as_versioned? It is available as a gem, and adds simple versioning to any ActiveRecord model.
If you need more features, act_as_revisable might be interesting. According to the link, it adds the following features on top of act_as_versioned:
Pervasive Callbacks
Branching and Changesets
Deletes can be stored as a revision
Explicit is better than implicit
All data for a model is stored in one table
Wrapping up, requirements and installing
My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.
For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.
I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?
Active Admin (http://activeadmin.info/) was released in May of 2011, and looks like it's going to become the best Rails 3 option.
rails_admin appears to be the latest-n-greatest free project as of January 2011.
...best of all, there has been a lot of activity in the repository.
Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.
Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.
ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :)
Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)
ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution:
http://github.com/fesplugas/typus
You have mainly two:
ActiveScaffolding: the most popular but be careful with rails 2.1
Streamlined
ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment.
It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).
Try it: http://activescaffold.com/
Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.
Having also tried typus, caseincms and ActiveScaffold over the weekend, I can't rave enough about admin_data.
It is
super-quick to install (Rails 3 is the gem, Rails 2.3 is a plugin branch,
no digging through trees on github),
unintrusive (all code is in the vendor/admin_data folder or the gem where it belongs),
requires no set-up and optional configuration is one block in one file in your app,
correctly (!) gets all model information from your model definitions (primary_key, foreign_key, relationships etc.),
including multiple databases, SQL Server connections via activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, and even composite primary keys, as everything is abstracted on top of ActiveRecord, if you model works, admin_data will work,
works great with legacy data for the above reasons,
uses your existing authentication solution which is called in the most wonderful DRYness in your configuration file.
It maybe less flexible or pretty than other solutions, but this plugin does many thingks right for quick admin panel setup.
The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold.
./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2
This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.
I can suggest you active_admin that is best
Active Admin main site