Annotate Models Plugin

Rails model files contain no information on the tables they represent. This is a good thing in general, because it reduces duplication—add a column to a table, and there’s no configuration to update in the model.

However, when you’re writing code, it’s sometimes nice to be able to see just what attributes a model has.

Enter annotate models, a really trivial Rails plugin I hacked up in the plane back from the first No Fluff of the year. The plugin adds a comment block to the top of each model file, documenting the schema. If you update the schema, run it again and it updates the comment.

# Schema as of Mon Feb 27 00:55:58 CST 2006 (schema version 7)
#
#  id                  :integer(11)   not null
#  name                :string(255)
#  description         :text
#  image_location      :string(255)
#  price               :float         default(0.0)
#  available_at        :datetime
#

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base

  validates_presence_of :name, :description
  . . .

Install using:

$ script/plugin install <a href="http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models">http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models</a>

and run with:

$ rake annotate_models

It only handles models directly under app/models. And, as it’s new, you’d be advised to back up your model files before running it.