Topic Review: Rails Blog Scaffold - learn-co-curriculum/rails-blog-scaffold GitHub Wiki

Objectives

• Use rails generators to quickly create files and structures
• Identify what files generators are doing for us

Setup

No setup needed for this lab - we can solve every test with a single command.

Review

Run rails generate scaffold Post title:string . This one command generated a HUGH number of files for us. Luckily, these files follow the same conventions we've been using up to this point.

 invoke  active_record
      create    db/migrate/20151020140934_create_posts.rb
      create    app/models/post.rb
      invoke  resource_route
       route    resources :posts
      invoke  scaffold_controller
      create    app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
      invoke    erb
      create      app/views/posts
      create      app/views/posts/index.html.erb
      create      app/views/posts/edit.html.erb
      create      app/views/posts/show.html.erb
      create      app/views/posts/new.html.erb
      create      app/views/posts/_form.html.erb
      invoke    helper
      create      app/helpers/posts_helper.rb
      invoke    jbuilder
      create      app/views/posts/index.json.jbuilder
      create      app/views/posts/show.json.jbuilder
      invoke  assets
      invoke    coffee
      create      app/assets/javascripts/posts.js.coffee
      invoke    scss
      create      app/assets/stylesheets/posts.css.scss
      invoke  scss
      create    app/assets/stylesheets/scaffolds.css.scss

Different generators give us different parts of this stack. Generally, rails generate scaffold gives us the most out of the box. Let's look at what we got:

1. A migration to create a table called posts with a title of string.
2. A model called Post that inherits from ActiveRecord::Base.
3. Adds resources :posts to the routes.rb file. This defines the following routes in your application:

• GET requests for /posts, /posts/:id, posts/new, and posts/:id/edit
• POST request for /posts, PATCH request for /posts/:id and DELETE request for posts/:id

4. A PostsController with actions corresponding to each route. It defines methods for each RESTful action plus a helper method to load a post and a method to define our strong params.
5. View files to correspond to each route, including a partial for the form.
6. Stylesheets and coffeescript files related to the post.

Other generators can be used to get only part of this stack.

• rails generate migration create_posts title:string would give you a migration to create the posts table.
• rails generate model post title:string gives you the migration AND a corresponding model inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base
• rails generate resource post title:string gives you the migration, the model, AND routes for all restful actions, plus a controller, plus a folder for views

Which generator should you use? It depends on what you need. The scaffold does the most, but may give you functionality that you don't want.