Can't create a new class instance following instructions

Rails
1

I’m new to ruby On Rails, I’m running InstantRails on a Windows XP Pro.
SP2 machine. I’m rigorously following the book ‘Build Your Own Ruby On
Rails Web Applications’ by Patrick Lenz. I’ve reached ch4 without any
problem at all but on P101:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base; end
=>nil #Works fine to here but then:
story = Story.new #This fails with the error:
Error: Unknown database ‘shovell_development’
plus a number of other ‘from’ lines.
I created the shovell_development database earlier exactly as the book
instructed & I’ve used the show command in mysql plus manually checking
the relevant folders so I know that the database is there. I know that
some sort of setting must be wrong but I can’t find out where, I’ve
edited the ‘database.yml’ in the shovell config file, that seems to be
OK, I’ve also added the system variable to my environment variables
path as:
Name: mysql Value: Drive:\path\to\mysql\bin
so I’ve now exhausted my possibilities. I can only think that there
must be some setting or other agent responsible for the problem because
otherwise how would ‘story = Story.new’ know to look for the
shovell_development’ database as the whole command block doesn’t refer
to it at all?
Any help greatly appreciated.
[email protected]

2

On 19 Oct 2007, at 10:04, Glynne Hewlett wrote:

Name: mysql Value: Drive:\path\to\mysql\bin
so I’ve now exhausted my possibilities. I can only think that there
must be some setting or other agent responsible for the problem
because
otherwise how would ‘story = Story.new’ know to look for the
shovell_development’ database as the whole command block doesn’t refer
to it at all?

The bit that tells it to look there is the databases.yml file, so I’d
check that again and/or show us what’s in it.

Fred

3

Frederick C. wrote:

On 19 Oct 2007, at 10:04, Glynne Hewlett wrote:

Name: mysql Value: Drive:\path\to\mysql\bin
so I’ve now exhausted my possibilities. I can only think that there
must be some setting or other agent responsible for the problem
because
otherwise how would ‘story = Story.new’ know to look for the
shovell_development’ database as the whole command block doesn’t refer
to it at all?

The bit that tells it to look there is the databases.yml file, so I’d
check that again and/or show us what’s in it.

Fred

Hi Fred, thanks for your prompt reply, I’ve attached the database.yml
file for inspection but I’ve also found something else out, InstantRails
is searching for the shovell_development database in
/InstantRails/rails_apps/shovell which is the application structure
folder it created, but the database was created by InstantRails in
/InstantRails/mysql/data so now I’m confused as to why InstantRails
doesn’t know where it craeted its own database?
Many thanks for any help.
[email protected]