Mapping column names in legacy schemata

Rails
1

I have a legacy MySQL database with a weird naming convention - all
table and column
names have a prefix ‘_’ , which is annoying, and some of the column
names are misnomers.

I would like to apply a pre-defined mapping between MySQL column names
and method
names to be used in the Ruby class, without having the original column
names being visible anymore.

how can I pre-define a static mapping of all (legacy) column names to
different Class method names?

e.g.: given legacy schema:

Table _fix has columns:
_job
_ change
_date
_effect

When defining the Ruby class, I’d like to do something like this:

class Fix < ActiveRecord::Base
self.table_name = “_fix”
use_mapping ( # imaginary construct…
:_job => “job_id”,
:_change => “change_id” ,
:_date => “date” ,
:_effect => “status”)

self.primary_key = “job_id”
end

and want to access it like this:

Fix.find( id ).status = “partial fix”

which should acces the
Is there a way to do this?

thanks

Tilo

2

On Apr 27, 2007, at 1:22 AM, tilo wrote:

class Fix < ActiveRecord::Base

self.table_name = “_fix”
use_mapping ( # imaginary construct…
:_job => “job_id”,
:_change => “change_id” ,
:_date => “date” ,
:_effect => “status”)

You could add this somewhere, for instance in environment.rb:

class ActiveRecord::Base
def self.map_column(legacy, nice)
class_eval <<-EOS
def #{nice}
#{legacy}
end

     def #{nice}=(val)
       self.#{legacy} = val
     end
   EOS
 end

end

The usage is

class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
map_column :_job, :job_id
map_column :_change, :change_id
…
end

You see the technique in case you prefer another kind of macro. BTW,
that cannot be based on alias_method because AR accessors are not
defined by then.

– fxn