Agile Web Development with Rails 5, 1st Edition

Defining Your Data

In Depot, we defined a number of models, including one for an Order. This particular model has a number of attributes, such as an email address of type String. In addition to the attributes that we defined, Rails provided an attribute named id that contains the primary key for the record. Rails also provides several additional attributes, including attributes that track when each row was last updated. Finally, Rails supports relationships between models, such as the relationship between orders and line items.

When you think about it, Rails provides a lot of support for models. Let’s examine each in turn.

Organizing Using Tables and Columns

Each subclass of ApplicationRecord, such as our Order class, wraps a separate database ...