I have a few questions.
1.) Do you know what ./script/console does?
2.) If not, why not?
3.) If so, do you have any fun tips and tricks to share with the masses?
It occured to me earlier that many people, who might have came from the PHP camp, may have never really tested their object-oriented code from some sort of interactive program. (irb) If you are coming from the Python, Java, etc worlds, interactive testing isn’t anything new. Rails is nice enough to bundle a console script right within it!
I meet people online who have never even tried to run it. There are not many tutorials on the wiki that show console… and in my opinion, its one of the coolest things about Ruby and Rails. (but, I come from the php world…)
So, if you aren’t using it… why not? got a moment? try this from the root path of your Rails application.
./script/console
It start up okay? If so, what is the name of one of your models? Let’s say that I have a model structure like:
class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :orders, :dependent => true
end
class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :customer
end
From console, you can access your models and do all sorts of fun
things.
>> y = Customer.find(16)
=> #<Customer:0x2743ea4 @attributes={"name"=>"Robby", "id"=>"16"}>
>> y.orders
=> [#<Order:0x27416b8 @attributes={"id"=>"18", "amount"=>"12.00", "customer_id"=>"16"}>, #<Order:0x274167c @attributes={"id"=>"19", "amount"=>"12.50", "customer_id"=>"16"}>]
Pretty neat, huh?
>> o = Order.find(18)
=> #<Order:0x273da68 @attributes={"id"=>"18", "amount"=>"12.00", "customer_id"=>"16"}>
>> o.customer.name
=> "Robby"
If you are remotely a console wizard, please share some tips and tricks for those who are not sure what to do with it. I personally find myself in console all the time that I am working with Rails, testing stuff out with my models, before I move any of the code to my application.
It sure beats, hitting refresh in your browser all day. :-)
