Tuesday October 16, 2007

Let's jump to the good stuff right away:

Okay, now let's motivate it. Let's say you're writing a migration:

Hmm, what's the second parameter to the column method again?

Ah yes, the column type. Notice how the RDoc for the method call surrounding the completion point is shown above - and perhaps more importantly, the symbol alternatives for the current parameter are also proposed below. Let's choose one.

Ah yes, the third parameter - the options. Again the documentation is shown above (I've cropped it in this image) where you can read the details - but many of the alternatives are listed here. Let's choose the :null hash key.

The parameter completion support I've shown here isn't specific to ActiveRecord. Let's say you're in an ERB file and calling into say the NumberHelpers:

Anyway, we're done editing the migration. Now let's jump over to a controller file and reference the Product model that is using the database table for this migration. Let's ask for completion on the @product field that was just populated with a Product object:

The icon should make it really clear that these attributes are coming from the database as opposed to some dedicated attribute code in the Product implementation. Notice how NetBeans also shows the type for each of the columns. Completion also works for the dynamic finders that Rails generates. Let's ask for completion on find_by (this also works for find_all_by):

NetBeans offers code completion for models by examining the migration files. Let's go create another one. Here's completion again, this time completing on the table name argument to rename_column:

Let's say we rename the description column to desc:

If we now invoke code completion in the controller again, notice how the Product attributes correctly reflect the result of combining the migrations:

NetBeans will also use the schema.rb file that Rails will automatically generate if you run the db:schema:dump Rake target. This is useful if your migrations are doing creative things that NetBeans can't figure out, or if you're renaming tables (which NetBeans doesn't model right in this release.) With a schema dump file, not only does NetBeans have to do less work to figure out your migrations, its format is predictable such that the code completion should be completely accurate.

P.S. This doesn't work right if you freeze Rails into your project; you need to be using Rails via Rubygems. I'll fix that soonish.