Some Rails Naming Conventions

Just notes about some of the naming conventions used by Rails.  I pulled this info from various sources and filled in the rest.
 

Model/Class Table/Schema 

Table (in database) – Plural, with underscores instead of spaces between words  (ie: steering_wheels)

Model / Class – Singular, first letter Capitalized, CamelCase for models (ie: SteeringWheel) 

Model/Class      Table/Schema

Order                orders

LineItem            line_items

Person               people

Address             addresses

Legacy               legacies

Mouse               mice 
 

*Foreign key fields are named…  tablename_id     (i.e.  customers_id, orders_id) 

*id  (Every table automatically gets a key field of “id”  (just plain old “id”)) 

*created_at, created_on, updated_at, updated_on  (IF USED, rails will automatically update these fields) 

*lock_version  (IF USED, automatic field used for “optimistic locking”)  (integer, default=0, null=false) 

*counter_cache  (field used to save database lookups) 

*type  (IF USED, allows “single table inheritence”) 

*mytable_count  (IF USED, allows rails to calculate the # of objects created for the class) (when you define it, make it default to zero) 

*position    (IF USED, “position” is used when sorting objects in a “acts_as_list” class) 

*parent_id    (IF USED, foreign key column in an “acts_as_tree” model) 

*lft and rgt    (IF USED, provides nested set enhanced tree-like functionality “acts_as_nested_set”) 

quote_value

template 
 
 

Controllers 

Class Name           File Name   

WeblogsController        weblogs_controller.rb

LineItemsController  line_items_controller.rb 
 
 

Views 

Folder Name       File Name                                  

web_logs            index.rhtml  (this is just the default, any number of html files can exist here)

line_items           index.rhtml   
 

/app/views/orders/index.rhtml 

Helper:

      /app/helpers/orders_helper.rb 

      Module Name = OrdersHelper 

To access the view from a browser, if you are using index.rhtml, you just need to specify the view folder name:

      http://localhost:3000/orders 

*If you create a file at app/views/layouts/application.rhtml it will automatically be used as a wrapper around all other layouts. 
 

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Changing from Non-IDENTITY to IDENTITY and vice versa
• Corporate lesson 5
• DBA Interview Questions – Part 1