How do a rename a domain class while reverse engineering or after reverse engineering.
i generated class using reverse engineering in Groovy and Grails.
the domain class name was AgentTable. I want to rename it as Agent. When i renamed the domain class using IntelliJ (right click - refactor - rename), it renamed the AgentTable to Agent whereever it was used. but when i start the server (run the app), giving error
"nested exception is org.hibernate.HibernateException: Missing table: agent"
I have to do this for few domain class. is it anyway i can give an alternative name while reverse engineering the domain classes.
or after domain class was created how do i rename it without this error.
Look into your database the name of the table it created for the agent. Once you know the name of the table add the following in your new domain
static mapping = {
table "table-name-here"
}
While it works I would not recommend #elixir 's approach.
In my opinion the mapping is not supposed to be used for renames. This is also how I understand the official documentation.
In the example they use it to map Person onto the 'people' table, not because of a rename but because of a semantic reason. Tables are typically named after the plural form. Here is a nice answer on another question regarding this. In the project I am working on the domain object 'User' is mapped to the table 'users'. You can not use the table name 'user' as it is an SQL statement.
Assumptions and clarifications:
In my experience Grails maps the domain name to the table name after these rules (example domain name 'MyExampleDomain':
separate the domain name by capital letters (My Example Domain)
lower case all (my example domain)
replace spaces with underlines (my_example_domain)
Following this your Domain Class 'AgentTable' has a table 'agent_table' in your respective database. After your rename Grails even tells you what it wants:
nested exception is org.hibernate.HibernateException: Missing table: agent
It wants to look up values in a table called 'agent' but it can not find it. The refactor function of IntelliJ does not rename the functions, so it will miss out on the database.
Luckily we know exactly what values it wants - the values previously found in 'agent_table'.
So why create this confusion with remapping domains and table names when we could just rename the table and be done with it?
The solution:
Execute an SQL script like this on your database:
ALTER TABLE <old_domain_name> RENAME TO <new_domain_name>;
The names are of course in their "table-form".
This simply renames your table to match the expected format in Grails. When restarting everything should be fine.
However you do not need to use rename. You could also create a whole new table, build it the way the domain objects wants it to be and then migrate the data. See section 'Problems with this approach' for information on when to use what.
Problems with this approach:
As always, tinkering with information a program depends on (and even generated itself) will often have some dire consequences if you aren't careful.
For example we have to pay attention to keys. If your domain object has a relation to other objects it will hold them in the table via foreign keys. Depending on how you chose to migrate the information in the table you might have deleted these foreign keys connections. You will have to add them via a separate SQL statement. When you choose to recreate the table this will happen for sure. Renaming it should keep the keys.
Another one are column names. If you choose to rename attributes you will also have to rename the columns via SQL. You will also have to remember the foreign keys other tables might have on the table you are renaming. RENAME did this automatically for me, but you should double check.
Why you should still stick with this approach:
Remapping domain objects to the tables with old names is bound to create code smell and confusion. Do you really want to remember these mappings in your head? And more importantly: do you really expect other people to have to work with this?
The best case is if people can't even tell if this object has ever had a different name and changing the database is the best way I know to achieve this.
My postgres table is having a column name called "class". On accessing the relevant model to this table am getting this error: (Object doesn't support #inspect). This all issue is because of using a reserved word as a column name.
Is there any solution to this to make the model accessible without modifying/renaming the column name of the table? Am using Rails5. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I just tested with a column named class, it seems to mess up ActiveRecord's internals somehow. Thus I think you'll need to rename that column to e.g. klass.
Or, in case you can't change DB schema, create an updatable view on top of it, where you name the column as you please.
I am learning code first and I have project to be used with an existing database.
I am a bit confused of what I meant to be doing.I will explain:
Do I need to create an entityconfiguration for each table in my existing database?
Within this EntityConfiguration for each table do I need to create foreign key relationships?
Do I need to do a ToTable for each table in my existing database?
Is there any free tool "codeplex" that pointing to an existing db will generate this codeFirst stuff?
I have seem few blogs about "EF Code first with existing db" but I am not sure or was not clear to me If Need to create this stuff or I will be getting strange errors like "MyColumn_MyColum" basically as if codeFirst is trying to build some FKs or something.
can somebody clarify?
thanks a lot. I know there are few questions but if you can answer 01 or 2 that would be fine.
thanks again
If you want the code to be generated for you use database-first approach with DbContext API. Simply create EDMX file from your database and let DbContext Generator template generate all entities and context for you.
DbContext Fluent API is mainly targeted to the code-first development approach where EF will created database for you from the code you provided. It can be used with existing database but it requires much more skills and understanding of mapping wich EF can provide to you.
Generally:
You don't need to provide EntityConfiguration for each table if you follow some naming conventions (entity name is singular form of table name, all properties have the same name, primary key in table and entity is named as Id or EntityNameId, etc.).
You don't need to define relationships manually if you follow conventions with exposing navigation properties and possibly also foreign key properties. The issue can be naming of many-to-many keys and junction tables.
ToTable is needed only if your entity does not follow naming convention or if you map some advance inheritance or splitting.
EF uses a lot of default conventions which drive how the names should be defined. Conventions can be removed.
You will not do anything wrong if you define EntityConfiguration for each table - it will at least allow you learning what is needed and your mapping will be explicit / self documented.
I have my MVC ready, but now, there is a requirement to rename them to a new name, from top level down(including View, Controller, ActiveRecord model names). What's the most efficent way to refactor all of them?
For example, rename from "Car" MVC to "Train" MVC without change the functionalities inside, only change the names. (the "Car" model also have some associations to other ActiveRecord models)
Unfortunately, there's no magic solution, you need manually change the class names in each of the files, and anywhere in code you reference those names. Find and Replace is your friend.
Having been through the procedure a couple of times, I think it's better to do the work of changing all the names rather then trying to mask different underlying names with routes or aliases - you'll just end up with confusing code in the long term.
I am having trouble understanding ORM in Ruby on Rails. From what I understand there is a 1:1 relationship between tables/columns and objects/attributes. So every record is an object.
Also what exactly is a Model? I know it maps to a table.
What I'm really after is a deeper understanding of the above. Thank you in advance for your help
I'm a Web developer going from PHP to Ruby on Rails.
"From what I understand there is a 1:1 relationship between tables/columns and objects/attributes. So every record is an object."
That is not exactly correct, unless you use the term "object" very loosely. Tables are modelled by classes, while table records are modeled by instances of those classes.
Let's say you have a clients table, with columns id (autonum) and name (varchar). Let's say that it has only one record, id=1 and a name="Ford". Then:
The DB table clients will map to the model class Client.
The record will map to a model instance, meaning that you have to create the object and assign it to a variable in order to work with the record. The most common way would be to do ford = Client.find(1)
The two columns of the table will map to methods on the ford variable. You can do ford.id and you will get 1. You can do ford.name and you will get the string "Ford". You can also change the name of the client by doing ford.name = "Chevrolet", and then commit the changes on the database by doing ford.save.
"Also what exactly is a Model? I know it maps to a table"
Models are just classes with lots of very useful methods for manipulating your database. Here are some examples:
Validations: Besides the typical db-driven validations ("this field can't be null") you can implement much complex validations in ruby ("this field must be a valid email" is the most typical one). Validations are run just before you invoke "save" on a model instance.
Relationships: The foreign keys can also be mapped onto models. For example, if you had a brands table (with its corresponding Brand model) associated via a foreign key to your ford client, you could do ford.brands and you would get an array of objects representing all the records on the brands table that have a client_id = 1.
Queries: Models allow you to create queries in ruby, and translate them to SQL themselves. Most people like this feature.
These are just some examples. Active record provides much more functionalities such as translations, scoping in queries, or support for single table inheritance.
Last but not least, you can add your own methods to these classes.
Models are a great way of not writing "spaguetti code", since you are kind of forced to separate your code by functionality.
Models handle database interaction, and business logic
Views handle html rendering and user interaction
Controllers connect Models with Views
ORM in Rails is an implementation of the Active Record pattern from Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book. Accordingly, the Rails ORM framework is named ActiveRecord.
The basic idea is that a database table is wrapped into a class and an instance of an object corresponds to a single row in that table. So creating a new instance adds a row to the table, updating the object updates the row etc. The wrapper class implements properties for each column in the table. In Rails' ActiveRecord, these properties are made available automatically using Ruby metaprogramming based on the database schema. You can override these properties if required if you need to introduce additional logic. You can also add so-called virtual attributes, which have no corresponding column in the underlying database table.
Rails is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, so a Rails model is the M in MVC. As well as being the ActiveRecord wrapper class described above it contains business logic, including validation logic implemented by ActiveRecord's Validation module.
Further Reading
Rails Database Migrations guide
Rails Active Record Validations and Callbacks guide
Active Record Associations guide
Active Record Query Interface guide
Active Record API documentation
Models: Domain objects such like User, Account or Status. Models are not necessarily supported by a database backend, as for example Status can be just a simple statically-typed enumeration.
ActiveRecord:
Provides dynamic methods for quering database tables. A database table is defined as a class which inherits ActiveRecord class (pseudo-PHP example):
class User extends ActiveRecord {}
//find a record by name, and returns an instance of `User`
$record = User::find_by_name("Imran");
echo $record->name; //prints "Imran"
//there are a lot more dynamic methods for quering
New records are created by creating new instances of ActiveRecord-inherited classes:
class Account extends ActiveRecord {}
$account = new Account();
$account->name = "Bank Account";
$account->save();
There are two pieces here: the ORM and Rails's MVC pattern. ORM is short for "object-relational mapping", and it does pretty much what it says: it maps tables in your database to objects you can work with.
MVC is short for "model-view-controller", the pattern that describes how Rails turns your domain behavior and object representations into useful pages. The MVC pattern breaks down into three chunks:
Models contain a definition of what an object in your domain represents, and how it is related to other models. It also describes how fields and relationships represented in the object map to backing stores (such as a database). Note that, per se, there's nothing about a model which prescribes that you have to use a particular ORM (or even an ORM at all).
Controllers specify how models should interact with each other to produce useful results in response to a user request.
Views take the results created by controllers and render them in the desired way. (By the time you get to your view, you should mostly know what's being rendered, and there should be very little behavior happening.)
The definition from Wikipedia:
Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM,
and O/R mapping) in computer software
is a programming technique for
converting data between incompatible
type systems in relational databases
and object-oriented programming
languages. This creates, in effect, a
"virtual object database" that can be
used from within the programming
language.
From a PHP view it will be in the following way(via example)
Connect to the database and get some row from posts table.
Turn that row to an object with attributes like those in the table columns.
If the posts has comments in comments table, you can also do post.comments and you get the comments also as an array of objects as well.
You can define relationships between tables like saying: Posts has_many Comments, a Comment belongs to a post and so.
So basically you are not working with database rows, instead you turn those rows and their relationships to objects with composition or inheritance relationships.
In layman's terms.
A Rails Model is proxy to a table in the database. These models happens to be Ruby classes.
The objects of these classes are proxies to rows in the table of which this model is a proxy.
Finally the attributes of these objects are proxies to the column data for that particular row.
Above is actually the Rails ActiveRecord ORM.
1:1 is not quite correct, since there is object-relation impedance mismatch.