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!

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