[for those of you who already got a pull request about the change_table block I apologize for the double post - I'm still figuring out github / mailing list etiquette]
I just created a fork of rails in which I added the ability to define change_table blocks like so:
change_table :videos do |t| t.add_timestamps t.add_belongs_to :goat t.add_string :name, :email, :limit => 20 t.remove_column :name, :email # => takes an array t.rename t.string :some_string # => executes against the renamed table end
The change involved lots of docs and a 1:2.6 code:test ratio so it looks like a lot of code, but at the heart of it it's about 90 lines of methods that wrap standard migration actions but pass the table name in. It's almost purely a syntax update - the only real change is that remove_column now takes an array.
The need it fills
This is a very blue-collar developer kind of fork. It's or people that work with lots of small projects, who work with legacy databases or databases that are being denormalized, who integrate other apps like Beast often etc... It also adds some sugar for people who are developing plugin apps that would benefit from having migrations that don't always create tables.
Basically I find myself writing change statements more often than writing create blocks, and this dries all of that up.
Strong points
It's well tested and documented and for the most part very consistent with other migration syntax - with one naming issue which I'll mention below. It's analogous to the form helpers where they stand alone with a type, or can be built as part of a block.
As far as naming goes it mimics both the create_table and the change methods:
* t.column => t.add_column * t.timestamps => t.add_timestamps * t.string => t.add_string
If the method ended in _table, I took off _table, so there are also these 2 methods:
* t.rename * t.drop
stephencelis brought up to me the fact that "rename" could be a bit confusing at first, since it's no longer unambiguous - so the three options seem to be. I've got 2 apps going now where I create a table, dump a bunch of data into it from various sources and then drop it, all in the up method, and I've used "drop" in a block in a real app, which is why I included it.
Would anyone else find these shortcuts helpful? That is, would you pull it into your git repo, or install it as a gem?
I sent out a pull request to the people who were watching the github rails repo, but from the response I gather that pull requests are not the way to go, so as a second question - how should I go about submitting patches now? Are people still doing the +1 on tickets?
Sorry again for those of you who are getting this for the second time.
Jeff Dean
http://github.com/zilkey/rails/commit/674e950c820f6171288f12cf8ba59b5d3eb698f0 http://github.com/zilkey/rails/wikis http://ar.zilkey.com/
