Demonstration; demo or die

rubyonrails-talk
1

I like these fixtures files I am writing for the testing units. That makes a lot of sense to me.

As I get to about the 60% point in my little web-application-to-learn- rails, I have started to do little demonstrations. "See, you login here, then you look for a student, assign them to your 'parent' sheet, then put in your emergency contacts like this..." and I realize that what I REALLY want (what I really really want) is to be able to reset the database to a demonstration position. So I don't have to delete associations and start from a blank page again to show it off.

The testing stuff is a little opaque to me.

If I wrote a bunch of fixture files, is there a simple way to say, "Dump the records out of the tables in the db, load these in for the demonstration..." or should I just start writing a script that empties the tables and reads in the YAML files manually?

I'd hate to be duplicating work that's already sitting in this clever, shiny machine I've installed on my iMac.

Thanks, --Colin

2

Depending on your database, sure. I often take my production database and bring it over to my development machine, especially when something is broken and I want to fix it.

With postgresql, I do:

  pg_dump eq2guild_development > production-20071018.sql   svn add production-20071018.sql

and then on my development machine:

  svn up   dropdb eq2guild_development   createdb -E utf8 eq2guild_development   psql -q eq2guild_development < production-20071018.sql

I suspect you could write a Ruby script that would take all the active record entries and write a yaml file. After all, Toon.find(1).to_yaml will even produce pretty good code for it. I suspect there are ways to load yaml fixtures into a 'demo' database -- in fact, is there any reason you can't have a demo environment, just like production, test, and development?

--Michael

3

The excellent AR_Fixtures plugin can be used to dump tables into fixtures,and there’s a rake task for loading fixtures back in.

I personally create my own rake task to bootstrap a database for a demo, so I can keep my fixtures solely for testing.