From: Elizabeth <elizabeth.buckwalter@...>
Date: 2009-08-19T02:05:15+09:00
Subject: Re: External Model Definition Using ActiveRecord

On Aug 18, 3:32 am, Brian Candler <b.cand...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Elizabeth wrote:
> > I've been Googling this topic, and I haven't found the answer.
>
> > In Rails, the Models are defined in external files.  How do you use
> > externally defined models in Ruby using ActiveRecord.  I have a rails
> > app and a ruby app which will share the model definitions.  I want to
> > use the DRY technique, so I don't want to define them both in the
> > models directory and inside the Ruby application.
>
> At simplest, just load them:
>
> require 'rubygems'
> require 'active_record'
> require 'app/models/foo'
> require 'app/models/bar'

Thank you!  I come from Perl, so I kept thinking use lib.  I can
probably look it up, but since you're here, is require 'app/models/*'
possible?

> However you still need to establish_connection to the database in your
> app.
>
> Alternatively you may decide to bootstrap the entire Rails environment,
> which you can do most easily by running your script like so:
>
>    script/runner myscript.rb
>
> Then it will use the config/database.yml entries to connect to the
> database as well.

script/runner sounds like it will load a Ruby script using the rails
environment variables?  I will look this up!  This sounds even more
like what I need!

> Also, you can use script/console to get an irb session with the models
> already wired up.

:)  Too simple, but irb is definitely an under-utilized tool.

> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Thank you very much!  The simple answers are the best, and I very much
think that these will do it.

Elizabeth