Question

I’ve finally started making a Rails app from scratch and I’m getting the hang of it, but the only problem is that making all the models/controllers is getting really repetitive and totally throwing the whole DRY concept out of the window as I’m basically copying controllers and renaming them/adding/disabling fields. I have:

Projects
People
Tasks
Messages

etc and the first three need to pretty much have the same layout and CRUD. Is the only way of not having to manually create all of the actions/views each time scaffolding? If so, what other things does scaffolding generate that I need to be aware of. I’ve been cautious of using it in the past because I wanted to know how my application worked in the tutorials.

Answer 1

In my opinion scaffolding is not for new rails programmers, it should only be used after you figured out rails yourself and with a criticizing approach. It may generate whole files that you have no need, define unneeded routes etc…

You can have a look at the full details of what scaffold creates here

As for the repetitive controllers you are making I could suggest using the gem InheritedResources which eliminates a lot of this duplication (at least while you are at the basic CRUD controller operations)

InheritedResources sets the basic controller index/show/destroy/create/edit actions for you, all you have to do is to inherit from it using:

class ProjectsController < InheritedResources::Base
end

In case you have to, you can override actions by defining them yourself.