Question

I have to prepare a rather large amount of seed data for a Rails application. Based on my limited experience, I know of two ways to do it but want to know which offers the most flexibility.

One, I could do it with Rails and just prepare the seed data the way it’s used in the seeds.rb file

User.create!( name: "John" ) 

Or, I could create a json document of the data. For example, I know that Mongodb lets you import json documents directly into the database. I’m not sure about other databases…

It occurred to me that a json document might be the most flexible, because I suppose you could also use a regular expression script to turn the json into something like this User.create!( name: "John" )

However, I’m wondering if there’s any other issues I should consider…

Answer 1

One issue to consider is that you can’t always pass all the parameters through the constructor. Consider this:

class User
  include Mongoid::Document

  field :name
  field :role

  validates :name, presence: true
  validates :role, presence: true

  attr_accessible :name
end

If you have something like User.create({name: 'John', role: 'admin'}), then your seed will fail because role will not be able to be assigned.