Annotated models

Posted by Marcel Molina Jr. 3 hours ago

Ever working with a model and you forget what all of its columns are? Ever find yourself with your schema.rb open in a separate window so you can see what the structure is of your tables?

Dave Thomas, of Rails Pragmatic Studio fame (among a brazillion other things), hacked up a plugin that adds a comment block to the top of all of your model classes documenting the current schema for the given model. It ends up looking something like this:

  # Schema as of Sun Feb 26 21:58:32 CST 2006 (schema version 7)
  #
  #  id                  :integer(11)   not null
  #  quantity            :integer(11)   
  #  product_id          :integer(11)   
  #  unit_price          :float         
  #  order_id            :integer(11)   
  #

  class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :product

When the schema is updated, the comment is updated to reflect the new schema.