Question

I am trying to run a ruby script that parses a text file with album name, artist name, year on each line. It should then save a new record into a Rails model called Album.

(buildDB.rb)

fh = File.open('albums.txt')

while line = fh.gets
    if ( line =~ /^(.+)\~\s(.+) \(\'(\d\d)\)/ )
        a = Album.new
        a.name   = $1
        a.artist = $2
        a.year   = $3
        a.save
    end
end

I am running ruby buildDB.rb in terminal which produces the message

buildDb.rb:12:in '<main>': uninitialized constant Album (NameError)

This made me think that the script could not find the model. So I tried loading the rails environment by using

require "C:/ruby192/www/Project02/config/environment.rb"

at the top of the ruby script. The script will run without errors but nothing is committed to the sqlite database. I can also run find on the already existing Albums, it just seems I can’t create new ones.

I am a rails noob so, there probably is a better way to do this (seeds.rb or a rake task maybe). Any help or a direction to look into would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would use a rake task:

task :create_albums => :environment do
  fh = File.open('albums.txt')

  while line = fh.gets
    if ( line =~ /^(.+)\~\s(.+) \(\'(\d\d)\)/ )
      a = Album.new
      a.name   = $1
      a.artist = $2
      a.year   = $3
      a.save!
    end
  end
  fh.close
end

I added a ! to the save method so that any errors will throw an exeception. Also, make sure you close your files.