Question

I have a model “List” with an attribute called “description” of type string. Not a good idea so I want to change it to type text. However, I can’t change it.

I’ve done:

rails destroy model List

rake db:rollback

rake db:migrate

I then re-declare the model with description of type text and do a rake db:migrate.

Then I do:

rails c
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > List
 => List(id: integer, name: string, popularity: string, vote_counter: integer, description: string, created_at: datetime, updated_at: datetime)

As you can see, description is still of type string.

I look in the migration and it’s of type text.

  def change
    create_table :lists do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.string :popularity
      t.integer :vote_counter
      t.text :description

      t.timestamps
    end
  end

How do I actually change it to text?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The problem is that “destroy model” removed your migration script. So rollback is not going to rollback your original model because there is no migration script for it to rollback. When you ran rake db:rollback, you didn’t really see the drop_table(:lists), did you? You should have not called destroy model just because you want to change the model.

What you should have done is:
1. rake db:rollback
2. Change your migration script
3. rake db:migrate

The problem is that now your database still has the old table. So you need to manually remove your table from the database and run rake db:migrate again. That should solve your problem.