Summary of Ruby on Rails fundamental concepts

Question

Being new to Rails, I am having a difficult time finding a website or reference that gives a run down summary of Ruby on Rails. I understand MVC, ActiveRecord, and that sort of

Answer 1

I wrote some naming conventions some time ago:

Rails conventions

General

All filenames are in snake_case following the same conventions - Model: singular (e.g. Restaurant) - Controller: plural (e.g. RestaurantsController) - Table in DB: plural (e.g. restaurants) - URL's: all in plural (e.g. /restaurants, /restaurants/:id, /restaurants/new)

rails generate Commands

• Create model: singular (because the name of the model is singular). e.g. rails g model Restaurant name:string rating:integer
• Create migration: plural (because we use the name of the table). e.g. rails g migration AddDescriptionToRestaurants description:text
• Create controller: plural e.g. rails g controller Restaurants index show

Model (singular)

ActiveRecord methods

All in singular, because all ActiveRecord's methods are linked to the model. Examples: - Restaurant.all - Restaurant.create(name: "Burger King", rating: 2) - Restaurant.find(params[:id])

Associations

• Singular in the belongs_to. Because it belongs to one element.
• Plural in the has_many. Because it has many elements.

e.g.

class Restaurant < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :reviews
end

class Review < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :restaurant
end

Routes

Resources

Plural when defining a route for a resource:

resources :restaurants

Route helpers

• index: plural (because we are showing a list of elements). e.g. restaurants_path. Can also be used used for create.
• show: singular (we are showing just one element, it needs the element inside parenthesis). e.g. restaurant_path(@restaurant). Can also be used for update & delete.
• new: singular. e.g. new_restaurant_path