Ruby on Rails For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Some Things You Can Do with Models

In This Chapter

• Creating a Web site to store personal data

• Viewing and modifying a Rails model

• Programming for a model with Ruby

Here's a list of things that come in sets of three:

• Stooges: Curly, Larry, Moe

• The number of strikes until you're out: Strike one, Strike two, Strike three

• Things that influence the price of a house: Location, Location, Location

• Monkeys: See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil

• People involved in a love triangle: Person 1, Person 2, Person 1's best friend

• Books in the Hitchhiker's Guide “trilogy”: Guide, Restaurant, Universe, Fish, Harmless

• Items that would be in this list, if the list were more concise: Stooges, Strikes, Houses

• Parts of the Rails framework: Model, View, Controller

In case you missed it, the last item in the list is the most relevant. Chapter 5 deals with the view and the controller. This chapter covers the model — the supreme item in the Rails triumvirate.

To make the discussion concrete, this chapter uses one big example — a Web site that stores photographs.

A Web Site for Photos

Here's my completely unoriginal idea: Create a Web site that displays photos. Initially, each photo entry has its own filename and its own description. The filename refers to an image file on a hard drive. (For example, niagara_falls.jpg may be a filename.) The description tells you something about the photo. (“Alan beats me up on our trip to Niagara Falls with Mom and Dad watching in the background.”)

Niagara Falls?

This chapter ...