RubyArchive is an ActiveRecord inspired ORM. It connects classes to relational database tables to establish a persistence layer for applications. It allows for models to be connected to other models by defining associations.
RubyArchive relies heavily on naming in that it uses class and association names to establish mappings between respective database tables and foreign key columns. Although these mappings can be defined explicitly, it's recommended to follow naming conventions, especially when getting started with the library.
- Call .all on the class to retrieve all the records in the class and their columns (instance variables).
- Call .find(id) on the class passing an integer id to retrieve a single record with the corresponding id.
- Call .attributes on an instance of the class - it returns a hash with the instance variables.
- Call .insert, .save, or .update on the instance of the class to perform the associated database operation.
- Call .where() passing a string query, or a hash with keys (column names) pointing to search parameters.
- belongs_to and has_many relations can be built using hashes. The class_name key points to the related class, the primary_key points to the primary_key column of the class, and the foreign_key points to the foreign_key of the class with the associated column.
- The has_one_through relation sets up a one-to-one connection with another class. This association indicates that the declaring class can be matched with one instance of another class through a third class.
A table name can be automatically set using the inflector library, or it can be manually set with the setter method. A table name can also be retrieved from a model by calling the getter method.
Returns all the rows and columns for a given model.
Returns a row in the model's table corresponding to the given id.
The attributes hash stores all the columns of an instance of a particular model.
These are the basic SQL functions to insert rows into a table, update a specific row, or save a new row. Save will either call update or insert based on whether the record already exists in the table.
This method accepts either a string or a hash. For a string, it will use the input value as the where clause. For a hash, it will construct a valid SQL where clause with keys pointing to their values.
The belongs_to association takes a name and an options hash. The options hash sets the primary_key, foreign_key, and class_name to be used for the association. The name is called on the model to retrieve information via the SQL query that this method creates.
Similar to belongs_to. It returns the potentially many instances of another class that belong to the instance of the class the named method is called on.
This association can be used if one model can belong to another model via a belongs_to association in the intermediate model.