Add records from external ruby script

Question

What is the best way to add records to a database from an external script. I would like to use activerecord but I'm not sure how to do so outside the rails directory structure.

Answer 1

You can use activerecord in ruby. Assuming you have installed the required database driveer. you can do something similar to

require 'activerecord'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter => 'your_database_adapter',
  :host => 'your_host',
  :username => 'username'
  :password => 'password',
  :port => 'port_number'
)

to establish a database connection. Since you want to add records to the database, I assume the schema is already present. Then you simply do

class ModelName < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :modelz
end

class Modelz < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :model_name
end

And you are set. (Thats right, you can do everything that you can do in rails using active record once you establish database connection, even have relationships between models) You can do whatever you want with the object of the model class you just created. Like,

ModelName.find(:all)

@model = ModelName.new
@model.user_id = rand(10)
@model.save

etc etc.

If you don't have a schema in place, don't panic. You can create it by embedding code simlar to following after establishing database connection.

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table :sometable do |table|
    table.integer :int1, :int2
    table.string :str1, :str2
  end

  create_table :yetanothertable do |table|
    table.integer :anotherint
    table.text :sometext
  end
end

This should work fine. The code given here is a sample and may not be syntactically perfect. This should also help. However, the schema definition is done the older rails way.