Reusable State model/migration - how do you do it?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm new to Rails. I do a lot of work that requires standard State FIPS codes (both alpha and numeric). I know enough on how to generate my model and migrations and all that. It's a rather simple model: name:string, fipsalpha:string, fipsnum:integer. This lets me produce dropdown lists in my app that I can tie to a FIPS code. (For example Lousiana - LA - 22).

My question is this -- is there a way to not have to populate this data for every Rail app I use? I know you can create a constant inside the model, but I'd like to keep this in the database). I was wondering if there was a way to have the migration in addition to building the schema initially populate it as well? This way I could use this migration in any of my projects. What's the best way to handle something like this?

Nicholas

2

Never mind. I think I figured it out. You just simply have the model created first, and in a later migration just do the Create.activerecordclass(blah).

Nicholas

3

Well, you could do it all in the same migration -- just after the table is created.

Better yet, you should create a bootstrap file that you can run as a rake task that will populate your tables.

Hope that helps.

4

This is what I ended up doing - although I'm not sure it's the best solution. It seems like I should be able to use a block statement and iterate through a simple list to create the array.

class AddStateInfo < ActiveRecord::Migration   def self.up     State.create([         {:name => 'Alaska', :fipsalpha => 'AK', :fipsnum => '02'},         {:name => 'Alabama', :fipsalpha => 'AL', :fipsnum => '01'},         {:name => 'Arkansas', :fipsalpha => 'AR', :fipsnum => '05'},         .... etc, etc.....         ])     end

  def self.down     State.delete_all   end end

5

Actually I agree the better way is to model this in a fixture (csv in this case) and then I can load it and equally use it for testing later. Thanks for the suggestion - it's worked out great!

Nicholas