Playing with Dry Scaffold and Inherited Resources

2009 September 09, 12:40 h

There are several ways to start a new Rails project nowadays, specially since Rails brought project templates to the mix. On the other hand there are still lot’s of generators. So, today I want to just pinpoint some tips on this regard.

First of all, make sure you have all the usual suspects installed:

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sudo gem install rspec rspec-rails josevalim-inherited_resources mislav-will_paginate justinfrench-formtastic thoughtbot-factory_girl haml ryanb-nifty_generators

One other is dry_scaffold from grimen. I’ve made a fork and added rspec support today. I think the 0.3.3 version should be generated soon from Github, then you will be able to install it like this:

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sudo gem install akitaonrails-dry_scaffold

But you can also install it manually from the source:

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git clone git://github.com/akitaonrails/dry_scaffold.git
cd dry_scaffold
gem build dry_scaffold.gemspec
sudo gem install dry_scaffold-0.3.3.gem

Now, create a normal Rails 2.3.x project and configure your config/environment.rb with:

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config.gem 'haml'
config.gem 'will_paginate'
config.gem 'justinfrench-formtastic', :lib => 'formtastic', 
  :source => 'https://gems.github.com'
config.gem 'josevalim-inherited_resources', :lib => 'inherited_resources', 
  :source => 'https://gems.github.com'

And also add the following to your config/environments/test.rb:

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config.gem 'rspec'
config.gem 'rspec-rails'

In order to add Rspec support, create the initial Formtastic stylesheets and add a little bit of sugar to your layouts do the following:

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./script/generate rspec
./script/gererate formtastic_stylesheets
./script/generate nifty_layout --haml

Notice that I am referring to Ryan Bates’ Nifty Generators. I really like it’s initial CSS and layout to start a new project instead of the default ‘blank’ theme. But that’s just me :-)

The excellent Formtastic will create your scaffolded views with a bit more of web semantics, so it’s highly recommended to use. To make it look pretty, add the following to your ‘app/views/layouts/application.html.haml’:

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  = stylesheet_link_tag 'application'
  = stylesheet_link_tag 'formtastic'
  = stylesheet_link_tag 'formtastic_changes'

Finally, you can start scaffolding some resources to get started, for example:

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./script/generate dry_scaffold Post title:string body:text --rspec

If you don’t like fixtures you’d rather use Factory Girl instead doing this:

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./script/generate dry_scaffold Post title:string body:text --rspec --fgirl

By default, it’s going to create thin controller with Inherited Resources and paginated with Will Paginate. The view templates will use HAML and Formtastic for a semantically rich form. It will create tests using the standard test/unit and fixtures, but I’d rather choose Rspec and Factory Girl.

It’s also going to generate a separated “_form” partial that both “new” and “edit” views will use, which is one of those things that you do all the time after a normal scaffold. The usage of HAML is not very common, but I would recommend everybody to at least try it for a while, it will grow on you quickly. And having well formatted HTML outputs is always nice.

The Dry Scaffold also supports generating just models (“./script/generate dry_model”). Read the documentation on the github project site to understand all the options.

With this, you should be good to go and start to rapidly prototype your next web application.

tags: obsolete rails restful english

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