Manipulating a Rails site from Ruby code

[Craig Read]

Hi Everyone,

I have a Rails app that I intend to seed with data generated by a log parsing program (written in a later version of Ruby). I want some basic checking to make sure I'm not duplicating reference data, etc.

Should I be creating custom find / exists actions in the relevant controllers just for this, or is there a better way of doing this?

Cheers,

--
Craig Read
@Catharz
https://github.com/Catharz
http://code.google.com/p/bsss

[Nicholas Faiz]

Two ideas.

1 - just rely on your validations to ensure that you have unique data.

2 - Push all of your data into a set before saving it to ensure uniqueness (though, this won't scale well, but if your data is small it might not be an issue).

Cheers,

Nicholas

[Oleg Ivanov]

What kind of data are you working with? If it's not something
involving uniqueness tests on large texts/binaries, then I'd say it's
a valid use case for validations and unique indices in the database
(if you're using a relational one).

[Craig Read]

Thanks for the responses Nicholas and Oleg.

I have unique constraints in the database, but was wondering there might be a "simple" (or "common") pattern for this. A fairly "dumb" script will be performing the upload, and I'm hoping to avoid implementing much in the way of exception handling.

I'm currently working on parsing XML from the server. The list of items (that I need to be unique) shouldn't be too large to just retrieve and compare against before uploading to the server.

I was considering creating actions to check the pre-existence of items, but it doesn't feel right to create actions for something a user will never do directly, and what will hopefully be run rarely.

Cheers,

--
Craig Read
@Catharz
https://github.com/Catharz
http://code.google.com/p/bsss

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[Oleg Ivanov]

If you want to keep your client dumb, why not just let your server
code validate uniqueness of your data, and skip any non-unique
records, if you don't care much about them? It would allow the client
to concentrate on the single task of feeding the data into the server,
and let the server decide what to keep.

PS: you mentioned doing "parsing XML from the server" - if you're
using Rails on the server, and it's restful - have you considered
leveraging ActiveResource for your client? I personally find it to be
the easiest and best match for Rails-bound interactions in many cases,
as it basically removes the need for 90% of integration work and code.

[Craig Read]

Thanks Oleg,

I hadn't considered using ActiveResource (still very much a newbie at Rails). I had a look at it over lunch though, and that's exactly how I'll do it.

Thanks for the help!

Cheers,

--
Craig Read
@Catharz
https://github.com/Catharz
http://code.google.com/p/bsss