ruby on rails with an existing database

Question

I am very new to rails, and from what i have been reading and watching in tutorials only helps me build things from scratch, creating new databases and the models at the same time.

my company has an accounting / construction project management software system that was recently warehoused into ms sql server.

how would i build the models from the existing tables structure . im not needing delete update. im looking to create a remote web based querying tool.

thanks.

Answer 1

Connecting Rails to SQL server is a separate issue which has been covered a bit by some previous stackoverflow questions.

You can generate models corresponding to your existing tables in the same way as you would for new tables and then use a number of methods to handle places where your existing table and field names don't follow Rails naming conventions. e.g. if you create a Project model then Rails would expect the table to be called projects (plural). If your table was called project you would need to add to your model:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_table_name "project"
end

Similarly, if the primary key for your table was project_id rather than just id you could do:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  primary_key = 'project_id'
end

Answer 2

you can use sql manager to create the database.

rails use sqlite3 by default.