Question

I have a rake task that populates a database with values.

Here is a sample:

Icon.create!(  :category_id => category_id,
               :name => "Wink",
               :url => "#{url}wink.png",
               :icon_for => icon_for )

What I would like to do is automate this as the ‘name’ attribute is just the name of the file in a folder but Upper case and without ending while the ‘url’ attribute is just the file name.

The rest I control with variables.

Is there a way I could something like the this:

1. read the number of files in a specified folder
2. loop that number of times and create the object inserting the values for the file names where required.

How can I do this?

Thank you in advance.

Rails 3.0.7 Ruby 1.9.2 Mac OSX 10.6

Answer 1

Yes, you do that with the help of Ruby’s standard libraries. You should learn about the File class and the Dir class. Here’s a sketch of what your code could look like:

(Dir.entries("path/to/specified/folder") - ['.','..']).each do |filename|
  Icon.create!(:category_id => category_id,
               :name => filename,
               :url => url + filename,
               :icon_for => icon_for)
end

I’ll leave it as an excercise for you to figure out how to capitalize the first letter of the filename and chomp off the extension.