Publisher Administration for Book Inventory Management

(Page 1 of 2 )

In this second part of a series on working with the scaffolding feature of Ruby on Rails, you'll lean how to implement a publisher administration interface for a book inventory management system. This article is excerpted from chapter three of the book Practical Rails Projects, written by Eldon Alameda (Apress; ISBN: 1590597818).

Implementing the Publisher Administration Interface

We will start by implementing the administrator interface for maintaining the list of publishers. We need a table for storing publishers, so the first thing we need to do is to update the database schema by adding the publishers table to the database schema.

Updating the Schema with the Publishers Table

As in the previous chapter, we will use ActiveRecord migrations to make the necessary modifications to the database schema. We could also use plain SQL, but migrations have the added benefit of being database-agnostic and allowing you to roll back changes.

First, create thecreate_publishersmigration file, which you will use for adding thepublisherstable to the database schema:

$ script/generate migration create_publishers

exists db/migrate
create db/migrate/002_create_publishers.rb

Opendb/migrate/002_create_publishers.rbin your editor and change it as follows:

class CreatePublishers < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :publishers do |table|
table.column :name, :string, :limit => 255, :null => false, :unique => true
end
end

def self.down
drop_table :publishers
end
end

The migration will create a table namedpublishers when run, as the following sample output shows:

$ rake db:migrate

--------------------------------------------(in /home/george/projects/emporium)
== CreatePublishers: migrating ================================================ -- create_table(:publishers)
-> 0.2030s
== CreatePublishers: migrated (0.2030s) =======================================
--------------------------------------------

The new table has two columns:idandname. Note that theidcolumn is automatically added by ActiveRecord migrations, so we need to add only thenamecolumn to the migration script. We limit thename column’s length to a maximum length of 255 characters. We also specify that we don’t accept null values in thenamefield and that the name must be unique.

Following good practices, we undo all changes in thedownmethod by telling ActiveRecord to delete thepublisherstable.

Next: Generating Publisher Code with the Scaffolding Script >>
 

More Database Articles Articles
More By Apress Publishing

blog comments powered by Disqus