Inspecting the model in a Rails application

Posted by Matt Sherman on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Matt Sherman
Published on 2011-01-05T02:45:35Z Indexed on 2011/01/05 2:58 UTC
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ruby-on-rails

I am learning some Ruby on Rails, and am a newbie. Most of my background is in ASP.net MVC on the back end.

As I play with a basic scaffold project, I wonder about this case: you jump into an established Rails project and want to get to know the model. Based on what I have seen so far (again, simple scaffold), the properties for a given class are not immediately revealed. I don't see property accessors on the model classes.

I do understand that this is because of the dynamic nature of Ruby and such things are not necessary or even perhaps desirable. Convention over code, I get that. (Am familiar with dynamic concepts, mostly via JS.)

But if I am somewhere off in a view, and want to quickly know whether the (eg) Person object has a MiddleName property, how would I find that out? I don't have to go into the migrations, do I?

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