I am learning Ruby on Rails so I'm sure I'll find this out sooner or later.
Why would the scaffold method be deprecated in version 2 of Rails?
The scaffold method went against the spirit of scaffolding, which is meant to give you a starting point that you are supposed to build upon for your own needs. By generating the scaffold dynamically, there is nothing for you to edit.
The new way with the scaffold generator lets you edit the scaffolded files so you can use it to build what you actually need.
I am assuming you are referring to Dynamic Scaffolding, as the scaffold generator is still around and going strong.
David Heinemeier Hansson is on record as saying that Dynamic Scaffolding looked great in demos, but since the whole point of Dynamic Scaffolding was to teach people to use rails, abstracting it away in a single line of code was more a curse then a blessing, as no one uses Dynamic Scaffolding in production code . . . just for demos and tutorials.
If you have a copy of AWDWR handy, you can read about his whole explanation on about p81 in the latest(3rd) edition (I didn't want to copy paste).
You can still:
script/generate scaffold model_name
to generate your scaffolded model.
There is however still a Rails plugin out there that will do just what the scaffold method did before. It's called ActiveScaffold.
Because people thought it was supposed to be used for production, which would be a horrible idea. Instead you generate a scaffold which you can then easily edit and get it production ready from there.
Related
I have a Rails app which contains a single controller(with a method) and a single view page .I would like to avoid all the unnecessary files in my app to keep this in a simple way. I need an app with controller,routes and views. So how should I scaffold my Rails 3 app, so that it contains only a minimal information?
If you are working on a real simple app, probably you the best fit would be sinatra
That is not rails, but implement with ruby.
HTH
You can manually create the files, especially when you only need a small portion of what the scaffold would create.
1) Add a statics_controller.rb to the app/controller directory. If you literally only need one page, you can simply use the index action (name your method index).
2) Add an index.html.erb (or .haml) to the app/views/statics/ directory.
3) In your config/routes.rb add the line get '/statics' => 'static#index'. You can append , as: 'your_preferred_url if you want to define your own url.
In all of the above, replace "static" with whatever name you think is appropriate. You would also need to add a model and migration if you plan to interact with a backend database.
I personally feel its good to not use scaffolding initially when you are new to rails so that you fully understand what they are doing. Scaffolding is not really doing anything fancy or magical. Its often just creating empty files in the correct directories (like I outlined above).
You can use the rails scaffold to be very specific in which part of MVC you create. For example,
$ rails generate controller Comments
or
$ rails generate model Comment commenter:string body:text post:references
I would highly recommend reading the entire Rails Getting Started Guide. But there is a specific section on generating a controller with scaffold.
Since Rails 6.1. running rails new --minimal gives you an application without all the bells and whistles like action mailer, action mailbox, action text, action job, active storage, action cable, ... and the accompanying configuration and stub files. It then has an ApplicationRecord, ApplicationController and the basics for an HTML view.
The last couple of times that I've used 'rails generate scaffold [ModelName]' everything has been generated except that the controller is blank. It contains no methods at all. It's easy enough to copy that in from other sources, but I'm wondering what is going on.
The only unique thing about this application for me is that it's using the ActiveAdmin gem.
Any suggestions for how I could get this working as expected again?
+1 to hajpoj, but there are a couple additional steps you could use to troubleshoot.
What does rails generate scaffold_controller give you? My first suggestion to be to isolate the controller generator and go from there.
Following that, I would actually look in the Rails generator code at the point of controller generation and work backwards from there. Here is (I believe) the entry point, from there, you can follow the code to where things are failing. This is, obviously, not the easiest path, but would probably teach you a lot about the rails internals.
I am trying to generate a layout which I can use between my rails webapp and mobile versions. I have been using nifty-generator, but it says the generated files are identical to what was generated by rails3 new application creation.
What's the major difference between default scaffold and nifty:scaffold?
If you visit the Github page (https://github.com/ryanb/nifty-generators) for the project under 'Troubleshooting and FAQs' it answers a few questions including this one. The response given there is:
One of the primary differences is that nifty:scaffold allows you to
choose which controller actions to generate.
rails g nifty:scaffold post name:string index new edit
There are a few changes to the generated code as well, such as no XML
format by default.
It also offers support for HAML, Shoulda, and RSpec.
Once you get a handle on the code that Rails needs in its RESTful controllers I would highly recommend using Inherited Resources (https://github.com/josevalim/inherited_resources) instead. It really helps DRY up your controllers.
Is there an easy way to rename a controller and model in my app and all the instances in the corresponding code?
I'm using textmate, would this be as simple as using the replace function and replacing the word Post with Report?
You need to change the name of the Controller and the associated Model, Views, Helpers, Tests & Routes directories, file names, class names & the names in the class definitions.
I found two ways to do this but before you try anything I recommend you back-up your app, preferably with a Software Version Control system like Git & Github.com.
Your first option is to do it manually & there is a good explanation on how to do this here: How to rename rails controller and model in a project
Another way is to destroy your controller & model, and then generate a new one, this will remove all the files which were generated the first time round & replace them with new ones. Michael Hartl explains this solution well in his online guide to Ruby on Rails here: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#sidebar-undoing_things
This is the solution I followed when I needed to make this change to my app, I needed to replace a MVC scaffold I generated called board with a new one called product.
1. First
I made a back-up of the work I did in the layout of the board view, app/views/boards/index.html.erb
2. Then
I ran the below rails commands in the terminal window.
$ rake db:rollback
$ rails destroy scaffold board name:string description:text image:string price:decimal
$ rails generate scaffold product product_type:string name:string description:text image:string price:decimal
$ rake db:migrate
3. Finally
I copied my backed-up boards/index.html.erb file into the newly generated app/views/products/index.html.erb & did a find & replace in my text editor on this file to replace board with product.
I think the second option is much more reliable & quicker but it’s important to make this change early on in your project before you make too many manual changes to the code. It would be better to just take a little more time planning your MVC names & database tables properly before you start your project.
You can also use rails_refactor gem to rename controller, model, etc
for more info check https://github.com/jcrisp/rails_refactor
To rename controller and model use this gem https://github.com/jcrisp/rails_refactor
If you are using textmate, use 'command-shift-f" to look for a string throughout your entire project.
Yes and no. You can rename it that way, but you'll also need to rename the files as well or Rails won't know where to look for the files corresponding to the new Report model/controller/etc.
I think I am missing the point of scaffolding, does anyone use RoR scaffolding and if so can they point me to any specific examples of how they use it?
I am a big sass and compass fan, is it possible to incorporate this into scaffolding?
Yes, scaffolding as a generator is useful. It creates the files you need, then you customize them. I don't think anybody uses the active scaffolding anymore, I for one discourage it. But, as I said, the generator is usesful
rails g scaffold product price:float title:string description:text
as it creates the migration file, model and controller you need either way. I don't like the default tests (rspec has better test generators) as I value tests too much to have stupid autogenerated ones.
As for the sass and/or compass, I don't use generators for that, but you may try something like http://github.com/darthschmoo/rails-compass-sass-generator I don't autogenerate those as the views are always highly customized.