RJS Templates for Rails

RJS in Practice: The Expense Tracker

So far we have completed the “Thought Log” application and taken a look at how RJS fits into the Rails framework. Now it is time to examine an example that is a bit more realistic and solves some of the problems that you might actually run into in your own projects. My expenses have been getting out of hand lately, so let's build a simple application to help track them.

Creating the Models

First, we'll run the Rails model generator to create the models used throughout this project. The Rails model generator automatically creates stub files for the models and database migrations. Then we'll edit the generated files to add our own functionality.

expenses> ruby script/generate model Project
      exists  app/models/
      exists  test/unit/
      exists  test/fixtures/
      create  app/models/project.rb
      create  test/unit/project_test.rb
      create  test/fixtures/projects.yml
      create  db/migrate
      create  db/migrate/001_create_projects.rb

expenses> ruby script/generate model Expense
      exists  app/models/
      exists  test/unit/
      exists  test/fixtures/
      create  app/models/expense.rb
      create  test/unit/expense_test.rb
      create  test/fixtures/expenses.yml
      exists  db/migrate
      create  db/migrate/002_create_expenses.rb

The generator creates the Project model in app/models/project.rb and the Expense model in app/models/expense.rb, along with unit test stubs and test fixtures. The generator also created two migrations for us: db/migrate/001_create_projects.rb and db/migrate/002_create_expenses.rb.

Now that the model ...