Comments inserted below. Did the generator add the validations for that attribute?
> > Did it add the code in the toy.rb that implements the business logic involving that attribute? Did it add the attribute to the views that do not just consist of the simplistic tables and so on generated by the controller? Did it add the required tests to make sure that all the uses of the attribute are correct? For the Rails generators and their options that I have discovered so far, the answer to all these questions is, obviously, No. *Could* there be generators that do some of these things? Yes. *Are *there generators (or other tools) in the Rails World that do some of these things? That's what I'm trying to find out in this thread. So is it worth the hassle of messing about with the generator just for the few minor changes that it did make? As you develop an app starting with from a generated set of objects, the answer at first is clearly Yes. As you manually modify the objects produced by prior runs of the generator, at some point the answer crosses over into No. How soon you reach that point depends on the amount and kind of manual modifications you have made, vs the power of your generators to synthesize (or to help *you* synthesize) their new outputs with the manual refinements. The synthetic abilities of the Rails generator that I've tried so far (basically *scaffold* and whatever it invokes) seem to be limited to: 1. Detecting whether an object that it is about to generate already exists. 2. If so, detecting whether the existing and new versions of the object are identical. 3. If the versions are not identical, showing you a diff between them. 4. Giving you a choice between keeping the old version or replacing it *entirely *with the new version. I haven't yet found any help from Rails tools with synthesizing the old (manually modified) and the new (generated) versions of a *particular* object. I'll mention just two possibilities: 1. Even a tool that compares two files textually and helps you merge them by picking line-by-line between the two versions would be a significant help. 2. Better yet would be a "smart generator" - perhaps better called a *synthesizer* rather than a generator - that knows the structure of Rails objects and uses that knowledge to make (or at least suggest) syntheses of old and new object versions that preserve the functionality of both. For example, to address one of Colin's questions, suppose a "validates :name, presence: true" validation had been added to the Toy model before the new "size" column was added to the database. A synthesizer would recognize a validation declaration, and it would know that a validation declaration on one attribute is independent of the existence of another attribute, so it would leave the validation in place *and *add the new attribute to all the Rails objects where it is relevant. Or, more cautiously, the synthesizer would *suggest *this synthesis to the developer and let the developer decide. A suite of synthesizers that worked like this would extend the value of running generators/synthesizers waaay deep into the Rails development process. And such synthesizers are especially doable in Rails because they can exploit the fact - which even us newbies can see and appreciate - that Rails is a highly structured, and *well*-structured, system. Sorry to get into sermonizing. All I really want from this thread is to learn if any tools or facilities that provide additional generating/synthesizing functionality currently exist in the Rails World. ~ Thanks yet again ~ Ken -- 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/abfb70b4-bd2c-4f80-896d-d9d04de1a69d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
