As I continue along the process of becoming a web developer, I am constantly watching videos about various programming concepts. There are so many lectures, talks, and podcasts coming out every day, I kept wanting to keep track of my notes and various info about these videos. Since my last post discussed my first Ruby gem, and I’m learning to become a web developer, it makes sense that the next step in my learning would be to create a web application to solve my problem. My first hack of a solution to this issue is a Sinatra application I built called Learn Progress Checklist.
This project was my first crack at building a custom web app and wiring it up with my data. And what that really means to me is that I learned a lot about ActiveRecord in the process of building this application. The two main parts of ActiveRecord that I used most frequently were the migrations and validations. Honestly, I think the ActiveRecord documentation on the Ruby on Rails website for Migrations and Validations is amazing! While troubleshooting the construction of my app, I was constantly referencing back to these guides and learning that I could in fact set column defaults and ensure only the correct data is entering into the database with model validations. Most of the validations in this app are simple checks to make sure that the data is present as seen in these lines of code from their respective models:
class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_presence_of :content
end
class User < ActiveRecord::base
validates :email, presence: true, uniqueness: true
end
In this first example, validates_presence_of is just a macro that builds out some code similar to what is in the second example. The second example checks to see if the User’s email address is valid by passing in a hash of arguments that the email attribute must pass, that hash is: { presence: true, uniqueness: true }. ActiveRecord validations can be customized to fit the needs of any attribute, so they are a great way to preserve data integrity.
One other thing I want to note is that I built this app just over 2 months ago. And since then, I’ve been learning this amazing framework called Ruby on Rails. When I revisited this project to write a blog post, I had forgotten what happened inside a Sinatra controller. After building out all these CRUD actions in Rails apps, I found it really strange to see the actual routes located within each controller. I really enjoy the way Rails has that abstracted out in it’s convention over configuration philosophy.
