Generating the Scaffold in Ruby on Rails

[Master Class] [Designer and Developer Workflow] [Generating the Scaffold] 0:00 So, up to this point, we've generated a new Rails project. 0:05 We haven't really done anything with it, but we've created the skeleton for it, 0:07 and we've set up our GitHub account and sent the details over to Nick. 0:11 So hopefully by now, he can at least pull the project and set up the basic Rails stuff. 0:16 And our next step is to go ahead and configure it and see if we can get it up and running. 0:21 Now, I just got a message from Nick. 0:26 Let's go ahead and take a look. 0:28 "Hey Jim, I was wireframing the show view for the jobs...and I was thinking 0:31 that there were a few fields that we could add." 0:36 "I know we originally agreed on just having a job title and description for the job." 0:39 "But I think it would also be nice to add the name of the company 0:43 and a details link in case the company wants to include an external link 0:47 so they can see more details about the job." 0:52 Okay, so it looks like we've gone from having our job just be a title and description 0:56 to now having a company name and a details link. 1:04 That looks like a pretty easy change, but I'm glad Nick went ahead and sent that 1:10 as soon as he did so I don't have to change an existing model 1:13 because I was just about to do that, so the timing is perfect. 1:16 So, let's add that. 1:20 All right, so let me just go ahead and reply to him. 1:22 "Hey Nick, that all sounds pretty good." 1:25 "I'll go ahead and add those, and I'll let you know exactly what the different fields are 1:27 when I go ahead and generate it." 1:31 "Give me a few minutes and I'll go ahead and push the scaffold up with these details." 1:34 So now, let's go ahead and do what we promised to do. 1:40 Before we can scaffold anything, let's go ahead and see if our Rails application is even running. 1:43 So, the first thing I want to do is run bundle install. 1:49 So now, we've run bundle and it's gone ahead and installed all the dependencies 2:09 that are needed to run this application. 2:12 Let's start up our server and see if it works. 2:15 So, we'll type in "rails server" or just "rails s," and let's go over to our browser. 2:17 And if we load up local host 3000, we can see the Rails welcome screen. 2:28 So, it looks like our server is up and running. 2:32 Let's go ahead and generate our first scaffold. 2:35 So, let's go ahead and stop the server, and we will be generating a new scaffold. 2:40 If you want to learn more about scaffolds, go ahead and watch our videos on Ruby on Rails, 2:45 so I'm just going to be going through this pretty quickly. 2:49 We'll do "rails g" for Rails generate, and we're going to create a scaffold. 2:51 And our model is going to be called a job. 2:56 And if we look at our information, we need a title, description, 3:01 company name and details link. 3:05 Our title is going to be "string," our description is going to be "text," 3:10 our company name will be "string," and the details link will be another string. 3:18 A pretty simple model. 3:28 So, let's see what happens when we install ithis. 3:30 All right, that looks pretty good. 3:35 However, I did notice something. 3:37 We did generate html.erb files. 3:39 Now, Nick and I decided we wanted to work on HAML and SASS, 3:42 so let's go ahead and destroy all this, install HAML and SASS, 3:45 and see if we can get the correct generators to work. 3:49 So, we'll type in "rails destroy scaffold job." 3:55 And that's gone and undone everything that the generator did. 4:05 So, let's go ahead and install HAML. 4:08 So, let's open up our gem file. 4:12 And we're going to go ahead and add the gem HAML as a dependency. 4:18 So, we'll add "gem haml" and we'll save that out. 4:24 So, let's go back to our terminal and type in "bundle install" 4:29 so we can install HAML. 4:32 So now, we've installed so our Rails application will now be able to handle .haml files. 4:39 Let's go ahead and run our generator again and see what happens. 4:46 Now, we're still getting our index.html.erb, and that's because installing HAML 4:52 only allows us to read HAML files, it doesn't install any generators 4:56 for our scaffold to generate in HAML. 5:03 Now, we could go in and rename the ERB file to HAML and recreate them all ourselves, 5:07 but it'd be nice if our scaffold did come with HAML by default. 5:11 Now, one tool we can do to have Rails generate HAML is use the gem called "HAML Rails." 5:16 And this will add the generators that will create our different scaffold views 5:21 in HAML instead of .erb files. 5:25 So, we'll go back, add HAML Rails to our gem file, 5:29 save it out, and run bundle install again. 5:37 So now, we have HAML Rails installed. 5:46 Let's go ahead and destroy our original scaffold again, 5:51 and then let's go ahead and rerun our scaffold generator and see what we get. 5:58 It looks like it generated the HAML views, which looks pretty good. 6:05 So, if we go into our text editor, let's take a look. 6:09 So, we have our jobs, looks like our index.html.haml. 6:17 Looks like HAML to me and that'll be a good starting point for Nick to work off of. 6:21 And so, I think we're good to go ahead and stick with this generator. 6:27 So, let's go ahead and set up our database. 6:32 Now, by default, we're using SQLite3, so we'll run the task 6:34 "rake db: create" to go ahead and create our database. 6:37 Done, and our generator set up a migration for us for our jobs, 6:43 so we'll run "rake db: migrate." 6:47 And it's gone ahead and created the table "jobs." 6:54 So, if we start up our server, we can see where we're at. 6:57 So, going back here to local host 3000, the root page is still going to be the welcoming page. 7:06 And let's go to /jobs. 7:12 All right, we got our normal listing here. 7:16 We can create a new job, say "Ice Cream Taster." 7:18 Add some text and we'll give it a company name, and we'll give it a details link. 7:25 Save it out. 7:34 We have our show page for jobs, and we have our listing here. 7:36 And this is enough to send over to Nick where he'll begin working on the layout, 7:41 the user interface, the user experience and all of that 7:45 to actually make the app run properly. 7:48 So, I think this is a good point for a commit, so let's go ahead and do just that. 7:50 We'll stop the server. 7:56 We'll do "git add ." 7:58 We'll do "git commit," and we'll say we "Generated the jobs model." 8:01 And I'm going to go ahead and "push origin master." 8:15 And now it is up on GitHub. 8:26 So now, I'm going to go ahead and send a message to Nick telling him about this, 8:29 and letting him know he can start working on the views. 8:31 "Hey Nick, I went ahead and ran the generator for our jobs, so if you pull now 8:35 you'll have the jobs scaffold at /jobs." 8:39 "I named the fields: title, description, company name and details_link, 8:43 and of course you have the created_at and updated_at fields for the dates." 8:50