Rails 3 and mysql

In anticipation of our move to mysql.

Rails 3 and MySql

Software Business Model Reading

Paid to Freemium

Commercial Open Source

Changing Software Business Model

Elevator Pitch Competiton!

Dear Becca,

Congratulations!! The judges of the elevator pitch competition have named you a winner in our recent event.
I have requested that a check for $100 be sent to you via campus mail. Please allow the Business Office a couple of weeks to process this request.

On behalf of the Kabara Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at Saint Mary’s University, thank you for participating in our Elevator Pitch Competition, and congratulations!


Best wishes for continued success!

Teresa Speck

Helpful Rails Links

Getting Started

Mirgrations

Associations

Rails ERD

SQLExplorer Plug-in

Useful Rails Stuff

While messing around with Rails, I found it very difficult to keep track of my nascent model because the information is so widely dispersed. The table information is in the migration files. The association information is defined by the model files. And all sorts of naming conventions have to be remembered.

So, I got to thinking: Maybe there is a tool which can digest a Rails application and generate an ER diagram.

Guess what? We are in luck. A quick google of 'rails er diagram' discovered Rails ERD. The installation is quite easy. Drop a few lines in your Gemfile and run bundle install.

Once installed, I run the tool as such:

rake erd filetype=dot attributes=foreign_key,inheritance,content inheritance=true

in my application directory. The output of the above command is a file named ERD.dot.

You can then convert the ERD.dot file into a png file with a tool provided by Graphviz (You can grab Windows installer at \\csfile\software\graphviz). Once installed, you get the dot command which can be used as follows:

dot -Tpng ERD.dot > yourmodel.png

You can view the png file in any browser.

Here is what I have so far:

Which you really can't see too well, so I will post a copy to Blackboard under Course Materials.

Wandering Around SQLite Database

It may be useful (take my word for it) to be able to directly examine the contents of your SQLite database as it grows with data for our RADAR application. Further, it may be useful to be able to directly manipulate the contents of said database, for example, adding records and establishing explicit associations.

For such purposes, may I recommend SQLExplorer plug-in for Eclipse coupled with SQLite JDBC driver. The latter you can find at \\csfile\software\sqlite\sqlitejdbc-v056.jar.

Big Picture:

1. Install SQLExplorer plug-in
2. Drop driver jar into your Eclipse plugin directory
3. Configure SQLExplorer to see SQLite driver

For the last step I can help if anyone is interested. I am not going to go through trouble explaining it if I have no customers.