Question

I’m trying to create a migration for a simple table that is just used as an enum. So I want to populate the table immediately with its values. I tried the following:

class CreateUserTypes < ActiveRecord::Migration  def self.up     create_table :user_types do |t|       t.column :type, :string       t.timestamps     end   end    def self.down     drop_table :user_types   end    UserType.create :type => 'System administrator'   UserType.create :type => 'Simulation controller' end 

but I get this error:

rake aborted! An error has occurred, all later migrations canceled:  Could not find table 'user_types' 

I was following the Rails wiki and expected it to work.

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Thanks. But what you suggested doesn’t seem to be working. Well, I can’t see the strings.

sqlite> select * from user_types;  1||2009-02-08 12:00:56|2009-02-08 12:00:56  2||2009-02-08 12:00:57|2009-02-08 12:00:57  

Answer 1

This is a combination of two answers already given, but this should work for you:

class CreateUserRoles < ActiveRecord::Migration   def self.up     create_table :user_roles do |t|       t.string :role       t.timestamps     end      UserRole.create :role => 'System administrator'     UserRole.create :role => 'Simulation controller'   end    def self.down     drop_table :user_roles   end end 

Rename your class UserType to UserRole (along with the associated test classes, assuming you created all of these using the generators). Rails uses the ‘type’ column for single table inheritance, and automatically populates the field with a class name when you have models that derive from a base class.