Scaffolding

The Scaffold Generator allows us to create a controller, model, views, partials, stylesheets and tests with a single call.

In this section we are going to look at using scaffolding to create a CRUD app in double quick time.

Scaffold the resource

It’s traditional to make a blog, but feel free to make a kitten, or similar.

First create a BlogPost scaffold and give it some attributes. You can use the following generator as a jumping off point. You will need to add a content:text and probably also a date:datetime too.

rails g scaffold blog_post title:string

Look over the controller

Take a look at the controller that was made, you will find 7 standard actions allowing you to create, edit, show, index and destroy (edit and create get two methods each).

Spend a few minutes reading through the code and understanding it.

Look at the routes

You will find one line has been added to the routes file: resources.

This single line generates all of the standard crud routes for you. Check them out from a console by typing:

rake routes

Views

Look at the views. See the form partial? It’s used by the new and edit templates. Have a read and try to understand what’s going on.

Tests

The tests that have been built for you should work right out of the box. Run:

rake test

to run all of the tests.

Further Exercise: Validation

Use validates_presence_of :title to validate that the blog_post has a title. It is now not possible to save a blog_post without a title. Add validation for the content.

Try and create a blog post without a title, look at the error reporting. Do you see how it works?

Further Further Exercise: Homepage

Set blog_post#index as the homepage, so when you visit your Blog, you see a list of entries.

Harder Exercise: Friendly URLs

Add a slug attribute to the blog_post. Do a find_by_slug instead of a regular find in your show method like this:

BlogPost.find_by_slug params[:id]

Use a migration to add the field, generate the migration like this:

rails g migration add_slug_to_blog_post

Within the migration you will want to do something like this:

add_column :blog_posts, :slug, :string, index: true

Finally, ensure slug is a required field.

You can now hit a URL like this

http://localhost/blog_posts/having-fun-learning-rails