Question

Quick summary:
I have a Rails app that is a personal checklist / to-do list. Basically, you can log in and manage your to-do list.

My Question:
When a user creates a new account, I want to populate their checklist with 20-30 default to-do items. I know I could say:

wash_the_car = ChecklistItem.new
wash_the_car.name = 'Wash and wax the Ford F650.'
wash_the_car.user = @new_user
wash_the_car.save!

...repeat 20 times...

However, I have 20 ChecklistItem rows to populate, so that would be 60 lines of very damp (aka not DRY) code. There’s gotta be a better way.

So I want to use seed the ChecklistItems table from a YAML file when the account is created. The YAML file can have all of my ChecklistItem objects to be populated. When a new user is created — bam! — the preset to-do items are in their list.

How do I do this?

Thanks!

(PS: For those of you wondering WHY I am doing this: I am making a client login for my web design company. I have a set of 20 steps (first meeting, design, validate, test, etc.) that I go through with each web client. These 20 steps are the 20 checklist items that I want to populate for each new client. However, while everyone starts with the same 20 items, I normally customize the steps I’ll take based on the project (and hence my vanilla to-do list implementation and desire to populate the rows programatically). If you have questions, I can explain further.

Answer 1

I agree with the other answerers suggesting you just do it in code. But it doesn’t have to be as verbose as suggested. It’s already a one liner if you want it to be:

@new_user.checklist_items.create! :name => 'Wash and wax the Ford F650.'

Throw that in a loop of items that you read from a file, or store in your class, or wherever:

class ChecklistItem < AR::Base
  DEFAULTS = ['do one thing', 'do another']
  ...
end

class User < AR::Base
  after_create :create_default_checklist_items

  protected
  def create_default_checklist_items
    ChecklistItem::DEFAULTS.each do |x|
      @new_user.checklist_items.create! :name => x
    end
  end
end

or if your items increase in complexity, replace the array of strings with an array of hashes…

# ChecklistItem...
DEFAULTS = [
  { :name => 'do one thing', :other_thing => 'asdf' },
  { :name => 'do another', :other_thing => 'jkl' },
]

# User.rb in after_create hook:    
ChecklistItem::DEFAULTS.each do |x|
  @new_user.checklist_items.create! x
end

But I’m not really suggesting you throw all the defaults in a constant inside ChecklistItem. I just described it that way so that you could see the structure of the Ruby object. Instead, throw them in a YAML file that you read in once and cache:

class ChecklistItem < AR::Base
  def self.defaults
    @@defaults ||= YAML.read ...
  end
end

Or if you wand administrators to be able to manage the default options on the fly, put them in the database:

class ChecklistItem < AR::Base
  named_scope :defaults, :conditions => { :is_default => true }
end

# User.rb in after_create hook:    
ChecklistItem.defaults.each do |x|
  @new_user.checklist_items.create! :name => x.name
end

Lots of options.