Dynamic Table Selection in Rails

Rails
1

I’m looking at various technologies in an effort to build a very
flexible but also very simple application.

A requirement for the application is to take the database table name
(or in this case a view) as a parameter. The database will be Oracle
10.2. The application will simply list (and paginate) records in a
view that is composed from two tables. The tables contain information
about files on the file system of the application server. (filename,
path, title, subject, etc)

The requirement is important because it ensures that one web
application can handle many customers. Customers are all inter-
departmental within an organization and would not care if their data
is inadvertently exposed by a mistyped URL, all of the data will be
publicly available and not restricted.

As an example I’d like it to work something like this, the URL to a
retrieve a given listing would be:

http://servername.domain/List/microgravity
or
http://servername.domain/List/ssme

The last bit of the path would be the database to use. From my very
limited knowledge of Rails this would not be practical in Rails. What
do you think?

Thanks,
-Mark

2

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 01:11:10AM -0000, mfaine wrote:

I’m looking at various technologies in an effort to build a very
flexible but also very simple application.

A requirement for the application is to take the database table name
(or in this case a view) as a parameter. The database will be Oracle
10.2. The application will simply list (and paginate) records in a
view that is composed from two tables. The tables contain information
about files on the file system of the application server. (filename,
path, title, subject, etc)
[…]
As an example I’d like it to work something like this, the URL to a
retrieve a given listing would be:

http://servername.domain/List/microgravity
or
http://servername.domain/List/ssme

The last bit of the path would be the database to use. From my very
limited knowledge of Rails this would not be practical in Rails. What
do you think?

It’s quite doable, and not too difficult. You can choose to do it with
or
without ActiveRecord. With AR, you’ll need to dynamically create
classes.
That isn’t all that difficult, but it can become a memory leak if you
aren’t careful. Without AR, you’ll just connect to the DB directly and
perform queries against it, displaying the result sets. It doesn’t sound
like you’ll be treating the rows as models, so this may be appropriate.

For the routing, you just need ‘/List/:tablename’ to map to a particular
controller and action and use params[:tablename] in the action
implementation.

Thanks,
-Mark
–Greg