A neccessary review

wills1979 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:30:35 +0000

In our first class I was behind the ball in the first 5 minutes. Even remembering how to start up my test server was a distant memory from App Dev I. Throughout the class the material started to look familiar as the rust began to fall off.

To aid in my review I'm documenting building out the directors: model and sharing some learnings along the way.

Our goal

Develop a symetrical functionality to the movies: model for directors using idiomatic (at least as far as I know at this point...) Ruby.

Key Functions:

Display an index of directors that links to each director's page
Show each director's details on their own page
Allow edits to each director
Delete a director entry

Model

We can use rails g model Director <items> to generate the model for the new functionality.

Let's try

rails g model Director name dob style

We can then add some requirements to the database such as

validates :name, presence: true
validates :dob, presence: true

Now if we try to create a record in our database without these attributes filled in the action will fail and throw an error.

R(outes)

Starting in the routes file helps us to understand the functions that we will need to implement across the app.

We can use the shortcut in ruby resources :directors to generate all the idiomatic routes. This is equivalent to

get "/directors" => "directors#index"

# CREATE
post "/directors" => "directors#create", as: :directors
get "/directors/new" => "directors#new", as: :new_director

# READ
get "/directors" => "directors#index"
get "/directors/:id" => "directors#show", as: :director

# UPDATE
patch "/directors/:id" => "directors#update"
get "directors/:id/edit" => "directors#edit", as: :edit_director

# DELETE
delete "directors/:id" => "directors#destroy"

And before that we did this

get("/directors", { controller: "directors", action: "index" })

# CREATE
post("/directors", controller: "directors", action: "create")
get("/directors/new", controller: "directors", action: "new")

# READ
get("/directors", controller: "directors", action: "index")
get("/directors/:id", controller: "directors", action: "show")

# UPDATE
patch("/directors/:id", controller: "directors", action: "update")
get("/directors/:id/edit", controller: "directors", action: "edit" )

# DELETE
delete("/directors/:id", controller: "directors", action: "destroy")

C(ontroller)

After some tinkering here is my controller. I changed one thing which was redirecting to the individual page for each director after they are created.

class DirectorsController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @director = Director.new
  end

  def index
    @directors = Director.all.order(:created_at, name: :desc)

    respond_to do |format|
      format.json do
        render json: @directors
      end

      format.html
    end
  end

  def show
    @director = Director.find(params.fetch(:id))
  end

  def create
    director_attributes = params.expect(director: [:name, :dob, :style])
    @director = Director.new(director_attributes)

    if @director.valid?
      @director.save
      redirect_to(director_url(@director.id), notice: "Director was successfully created.")
    end
  end

  def edit
    @director = Director.find(params.fetch(:id))
  end

  def update

    director_attributes = params.expect(director: [:name, :dob, :style])
    director = Director.find(params.fetch(:id))

    director.name = params.fetch(:director).fetch(:name)
    director.dob = params.fetch(:director).fetch(:dob)
    director.style = params.fetch(:director).fetch(:style)

    if director.valid?
      director.save
      redirect_to(director_url, notice: "Director updated successfully.")
    else
      redirect_to(director_url, alert: "Director failed to update successfully.")
    end
  end

  def destroy
    director = Director.find(params.fetch(:id))

    director.destroy

    redirect_to(directors_url, notice: "Director deleted successfully.")
  end
end

A(ctions)

No actions yet!

V(iews)

View are quite similar to the views for movies so I'm omitting that for now!

Conclusion

And now everything seems to be working! It is certainly easier to work from the idiomatic Ruby, but it can be more confusing at times!

Test post

wills1979 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:40:10 +0000

This is a test

DEV Community: wills1979