Todo list application with Rails 2.0!

I’ve recently taken a new position doing Rails applications full time (which I’m definitely excited about) however, between myself and the other developer, we’ve decided to go right up to Rails 2.0.2. This of course did not fit with me very well because I haven’t done rails development full time yet, and what rails apps I have done were in 1.2.6 and lower. I haven’t been a good developer because I wasn’t paying attention to all the new features and how they work. Of course I posted awhile back about some of the new updates here, but that’s about all I’ve done with Rails 2.0 until last week when I started my new job.

This is tutorial 1 of a new series I’m creating for making a simple CRM application that you can use for some of your daily tasks. Today we are going to create a simple todo list without writing any code (well to start off with). First create lets create a new app by typing,

rails -d mysql todo (I’m adding -d mysql, because sqlite3 is the default database and I’m using mysql)
cd rails

Next, we need to create our databases so we can type the following with rails 2.0.

rake db:create:all

Now that we’ve created our databases, it’s time to make our controller and model. For this, so that we don’t have to write any code, we’ll go ahead and scaffold this. We’ll type the following.

script/generate scaffold Todo title:string body:text done:boolean due:datetime

We can now migrate our database so we’ll type this.

rake db:migrate

Finally, all we have to do is start our server.

script/server

Then we can go to http://localhost:3000/todos and we’ll see our index page. You know have a working todo list, not very design oriented of course, but you are well on your way to making it yours. I’ve put up the application the way it should look here.

If you are looking for a version of this with pre-2.0 of Rails, you won’t be able to use the “rake db:create:all” command, so you’ll have to make your database another way. In the next tutorial we’ll add a customer database with a custom search so that we can search all your customers. Until next time folks!