newbie question: types???

Hello RoR veterans.

When looking at the following line in in the RoR getting started guide:

script/generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text

My first thought was "Nice!! So they demo string and text. What are the differences between these two, and what other types are available?"

So far I've seen the following used in various tutorials and blogs: string, text, integer, boolean, and references.

I just wish there were an actual *reference* page for this. Like google made for the AppEngine API:

This (by the way) took me all of 60 seconds to find. I've been searching for a similar guide in RoR all day and haven't found squat!

Hi Steve,

My first thought was "Nice!! So they demo string and text. What are the differences between these two, and what other types are available?"

The types Active Record supports are :primary_key, :string, :text, :integer, :float, :decimal, :datetime, :timestamp, :time, :date, :binary, :boolean.

(Source: rails.info )

Also, on api.rubyonrails.org I found the following information pretty quickly:

Generally speaking, you usually find all you need in the Rails guides and the API documentation. Now I wish there was some usable way of finding answers to questions where you *don't* know which part of Rails is doing the magic. I'd love to have some documentation based on the *topic*, like this here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/funcref.php

Newbies (like myself!) also tend to be confused at times when trying to find out whether our question is a Ruby or a Rails question. Thankfully the Rails community is pretty friendly. :slight_smile:

Awesome!! Thanks that helps a lot. One follow-up question, if I may:

From what I've read, it seems that "references" are only to be used for "belongs_to" associations? Is it best practice to simply avoid using "references" and just manually use (for example):

(Using script/generate) customer_id:integer

(Or manually doing a migration file) t.customer_id :integer

???

I guess my question is: what is recommended best practice for using "references"?

Thanks again for your help thortos!

-Steve

Thanks Ryan and thortos!

I found a little more information that I was looking for here (as well as at your links):

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#_choosing_between_tt_belongs_to_tt_and_tt_has_one_tt

Cheers!

-Steve