Ruby on Rails

Yaay!  I'm happy to report success with my first attempt to make a Rails app that works from an existing database. 

This first experiment used (a) the simplest "instructions" I could find (basically, Hassan's); (b) a streamlined version of the "Getting Started Guide" process for setting up a Rails app (but - this is crucial - omitting the step of running the migrator); and (c) a pre-existing ("legacy") database that conforms to the Rails naming conventions.

For the benefit of other Rails newbies (or oldbies) that need to build apps on existing DBs, a play-by-play of what I did follows.

1. Created new Rails app, x:

2. Populated the "legacy" SQLite database with table toys, and added one row to that table:

3. Added the toys resource and root to routes.rb:     


4. Used rake to see the resulting routes:


5. Generated toys controller:


6. Added the necessary CRUD methods to the toys controller:

7. Made index.html.erb, show.html.erb, new.html.erb, edit.html.erb, _form.html.erb, index.json.jbuilder, show.json.jbuilder, following the pattern in http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html.

8. Created the Toy model file, toy.rb:

9. In my browser, tried http://x.sunward.webfactional.com/toys.  Feel free to try it yourself.  (However, this is a temporary site that may be gone by the time you read this.)  It works!!!  That is, all the CRUDs execute as they should.

10. An odd note is that there still is no schema.rb file in x/db/.  If this is what Rails uses as its "database catalog", is the lack of it going to cause trouble down the road?

Thanks again to Scott, Hassan, & Colin for your key clues.

My next question is whether it is possible to sue the amazing Rails generators - in particular, scaffold - to more quickly create an app that works with an existing database - so it would not be necessary to go thru all those manual steps shown above.  I tried it once, and it tried to run the migrator and croaked when it found that the DB table was already there.  But that may have been pilot error on my part.  Comments and advice would be welcome.

~ Ken