SameShirtEveryDay.com

Rails allows you to create data fixtures which can contain test data which is used during unit tests and gets loaded into a _test database.

It’s possible to load that data into your _development database so that you can use the same data while looking at your site in the browser. This can be achieved using a rake command.

rake db:fixtures:load

Maintaining your fixtures could become realy tiresome, especially in text mode. So, there’s a way to generate YAML fixtures from the data. I use the following method to so.

def table_to_yaml(table_name, key_column = 'name')
  return nil if table_name.nil?

  list = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all(
        "SELECT * FROM #{table_name.to_s} ORDER BY id ASC"
  )

  result = ""

  list.each do |record|
    name = record[key_column.to_s].to_permalink
    name = "_#{name}" if name =~ /^[^a-zA-Z]/
    hash = {}
    hash[name] = record
    result < < hash.to_yaml().gsub(/^---s*$/m, '')
  end

  return result
end

key_column is a column name which will be used to name your records in YAML.

This doesn’t generate the actual files, but you can grab the output and save it in your fixtures.