Question

I want my Entry model to use multiple databases. When a customer joins the network a new database is automaticly created for this customer. Other models will use same database. Is this possible in rails?

Answer 1

Funny, I just came up with a solution to this ten minutes ago…

Here goes…

First off define the separate database connection in your database.yml

mine has

production:
 adapter: mysql
 -etc etc-

Then I added an additional one (for me, I’ve a legacy database I want to connect to…)

legacy_production:
  adapter: mysql
  -etc etc-

Repeat this for different environments where appropriate

The next thing I did was create a new file in ‘lib’ called ‘legacy_model.rb’ and it looks quite simply like this

 require 'active_record'

    class LegacyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
      self.abstract_class = true
      establish_connection "legacy_#{RAILS_ENV}"
    end

Now, to make use of this, I just create a class/model and inherit from LegacyModel like so…

class User < LegacyModel
  -any validations etc you might want-
end

And voila, it’ll access the legacy database instead of the one I’m using.

There are probably better solutions, but this seems to work for me – hope it helps!