Rails is pretty darn amazing. There are plenty of gems (Ruby packages) that provide additional functionality. They’re like Drupal modules, except with more customizability (not just hooks) and fewer pre-built administrative interfaces (you win some, you lose some).

For example, the client asked me, “Can we edit the static content?” Now if I had asked about this as a requirement at the beginning of the project, we might have gone with Drupal instead–although the Rails Surveyor still feels cleaner than a CCK-based survey type, so we might’ve stayed with Rails.

Anyway, we were well into Rails now, so I looked for a content management system that I could integrate into the Rails 3-based website. After some experimenting with Refinery CMS (looks slick, but couldn’t get it to do what I wanted) and Comfortable Mexican Sofa (looked pretty geeky), I settled on Rich CMS. I nearly gave up on Rich CMS, actually, because I’d gotten stuck, but the web demo helped me figure out what I needed to do in order to enable it.

We’re still emptying and reloading the database a lot, though, so I wanted to make sure that I could save the CmsContent items and reload them. I didn’t want to back up the entire database, just a table or two. There were some gems that promised the ability to back up specific models, but I couldn’t figure it out. Eventually I decided to use the table-focused Rake code I saw in order to export the data to fixtures (seems to be based on code from the Rails Recipes book).

task :extract_fixtures => :environment do
  sql  = "SELECT * FROM %s"
  skip_tables = ["schema_info"]
  ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
  if (not ENV['TABLES'])
    tables = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables - skip_tables
  else
    tables = ENV['TABLES'].split(/, */)
  end
  if (not ENV['OUTPUT_DIR'])
    output_dir="#{RAILS_ROOT}/test/fixtures"
  else
    output_dir = ENV['OUTPUT_DIR'].sub(/\/$/, '')
  end
  (tables).each do |table_name|
    i = "000"
    File.open("#{output_dir}/#{table_name}.yml", 'w') do |file|
      data = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all(sql % table_name)
      file.write data.inject({}) { |hash, record|
        hash["#{table_name}_#{i.succ!}"] = record
        hash
      }.to_yaml
      puts "wrote #{table_name} to #{output_dir}/"
    end
  end
end

Being a lazy programmer who doesn’t want to remember table names, I also defined the following Rake tasks:

task :save_content => :environment do
  ENV["TABLES"] = "cms_contents"
  Rake.application.invoke_task("myproj:extract_fixtures")
end
task :load_content do
  Rake.application.invoke_task("db:fixtures:load")
end

Then I can call rake myproj:save_content and rake myproj:load_content to do the right thing. Or rather, my co-developer (a new IBMer – hello, Vijay!) can do so, and then check his work into our git repository. =)

Now we can re-create the development database as often as we’d like without losing our page content!

2011-04-24 Sun 16:29