Scott & Colin ~ Perhaps this conversation has reached the end of its useful life. But in case there still is anything left to be learned, let me respond to a couple of your comments.
"Why on earth would you keep re-generating scaffolds over and over???" [Scott] Because generators, when they work, are easier and more reliable than manually updating code. Rails obviously has a powerful set of generators for jump-starting development. That's one big reason why I'm spending all this time evaluating it (vs other platforms like Django). This whole thread is trying to understand the powers and limits of the Rails generators, specifically in the somewhat-Rails-nonstandard scenario where the DB schema exists independently of the Rails app, so the requirement is to tailor (and re-tailor) the Rails objects to fit the DB schema, with as much automagic support as possible. Of course, the job of generators rapidly becomes harder when you ask them to update objects that have been modified manually since they were originally generated. But some generators can go farther into update-land than others, and I'm trying to understand where Rails is on this dimension. "The *only* thing you have to do now is to add the new field to the view. Everything else is handled automatically. All you are achieving by running the generator is adding that field to the view." Not so, from my experiments. Running "rake db:schema:dump" added the field to schema.rb, and the output from *scaffold *indicates that it edited a total of 8 different files for me, namely: conflict test/fixtures/toys.yml force test/fixtures/toys.yml conflict app/controllers/toys_controller.rb force app/controllers/toys_controller.rb conflict app/views/toys/index.html.erb force app/views/toys/index.html.erb conflict app/views/toys/show.html.erb force app/views/toys/show.html.erb conflict app/views/toys/_form.html.erb force app/views/toys/_form.html.erb conflict test/controllers/toys_controller_test.rb force test/controllers/toys_controller_test.rb conflict app/views/toys/index.json.jbuilder force app/views/toys/index.json.jbuilder conflict app/views/toys/show.json.jbuilder force app/views/toys/show.json.jbuilder Not only did the generator update all these files for me, but it actually *knew *which files had to be updated so that my app could handle the new database column - another huge advantage for a newbie like me, who would otherwise have to spend hours figuring that out. Were not all of these 9 edits necessary to weave the new database column into my app? So, what's the best approach: Run 3 simple console commands, or manually locate and edit 9 files (and debug the edits)? I guess I see a lot more value in the Rails generators than you guys do. And I'm still looking to see if they have still further powers (especially in update-land) that I haven't discovered yet. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/548cae49-4a99-4634-aa51-1d01773544b0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.