How do you discover model attributes in Rails

Question

I am finding it difficult to easily see what attributes properties exist on all of my model classes since they are not explicitly defined in my class files   To discover model attributes  I keep the schema rb file open and flip between it and whatever code I m writing as needed   This works but is clunky because I have to switch between reading the schema file to pick up attributes  the model class file to check methods  and whatever new code that I m writing to call attributes  amp  methods     My question is  how do you discover model attributes when you re analyzing a Rails codebase for the first time   Do you keep the schema rb file open all the time  or is there a better way that doesn t involve jumping between schema file  amp  model file constantly

User · Answer

To describe model I use following snippet

Model.columns.collect { |c| "#{c.name} (#{c.type})" }

Again this is if you are looking pretty print to describe you ActiveRecord without you going trough migrations or hopping that developer before you was nice enough to comment in attributes.

User · Answer

some instance attributes   Source  blog

User · Answer

If you re just interested in the properties and data types from the database  you can use Model inspect   irb main  001 0 gt  User inspect   gt   User id  integer  email  string  encrypted password  string   reset password token  string  reset password sent at  datetime   remember created at  datetime  sign in count  integer   current sign in at  datetime  last sign in at  datetime   current sign in ip  string  last sign in ip  string  created at  datetime   updated at  datetime     Alternatively  having run rake db create and rake db migrate for your development environment  the file db schema rb will contain the authoritative source for your database structure   ActiveRecord  Schema define version  20130712162401  do   create table  users   force  true do  t      t string    email                    default      null  false     t string    encrypted password       default      null  false     t string    reset password token      t datetime  reset password sent at      t datetime  remember created at      t integer   sign in count            default  0     t datetime  current sign in at      t datetime  last sign in at      t string    current sign in ip      t string    last sign in ip      t datetime  created at      t datetime  updated at    end end

User · Answer

For Schema related stuff  Model column names          Model columns hash          Model columns    For instance variables attributes in an AR object  object attribute names                     object attribute present            object attributes   For instance methods without inheritance from super class  Model instance methods false

User · Answer

There is a rails plugin called Annotate models  that will generate your model attributes on the top of your model files here is the link   https   github com ctran annotate models  to keep the annotation in sync  you can write a task to re-generate annotate models after each deploy

[ruby-on-rails] How do you discover model attributes in Rails?

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