What is - !ruby/object:?

Rails
1

I’m trying to get this plugin to work:

It basically gets you all the cities and states in the United States.

However, it reads: “I havent added a rake task to populate the database
yet. But the YAML files are in vendor/plugins/geoinfo/lib/db/*.yml”

Alright, no problem, I’ll do it manually then. However, I look in the
file,
and I find stuff that looks like this:

  • !ruby/object:GeoinfoState
    attributes:
    name: STATE
    abbr: ABBR
    country: COUNTRY
    type: TYPE
    id: “ID”

  • !ruby/object:GeoinfoState
    attributes:
    name: ALASKA
    abbr: AK
    country: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    type: STATE
    id: “1”

  • !ruby/object:GeoinfoState
    attributes:
    name: ALABAMA
    abbr: AL
    country: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    type: STATE
    id: “2”

  • !ruby/object:GeoinfoState
    attributes:
    name: ARKANSAS
    abbr: AR
    country: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    type: STATE
    id: “3”

and so on

The file name is states.yml.

Now, my question is what exactly is this file? How do I use it? The
syntax
doesn’t exactly look like its a fixture…

I’m confused on how I can populate my db tables with that file. Does
anyone
know how? What is that file used for? how?

Thank you.

-David

2

On Tuesday, April 5, 2011 5:15:32 PM UTC-6, David Z. wrote:

and I find stuff that looks like this:
attributes:
country: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

and so on

The file name is states.yml.

Now, my question is what exactly is this file? How do I use it? The syntax
doesn’t exactly look like its a fixture…

It is a YAML file (which, by default, your scaffolded fixtures are as
well).
It looks like the YAML was used to serialize some ruby objects.
For example (irb session using 1.8.7):

require ‘yaml’
class GeoinfoState
attr_accessor :attributes
end
x = GeoinfoState.new
x.attributes = { :name => “ALASKA”, :abbr => “AK”, :country => “UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA”, :type => “STATE”, :id => “1” }
puts YAML.dump(x)
— !ruby/object:GeoinfoState
attributes:
:type: STATE
:abbr: AK
:country: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
:name: ALASKA
:id: “1”

I’m confused on how I can populate my db tables with that file. Does anyone
know how? What is that file used for? how?

One way is to define a simple class (similar to what I did above) or
ensure
the geoinfo gem’s version is loaded. Then do something like:

states = YAML.load_file(…)
states.each do |s|
State.create!(:name => s.name, …) # where State is your model
end

If this isn’t a one-off action, you could even define a method to do
something like this in your State class:

require ‘yaml’
class State < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.import_from(filename)
YAML.load_file(filename).each do |s|
create!(…)
end
end
end

3

Thank you for the response

So basically it* doesn’t* populate a database table? But instead, I
retrieve
it directly from the yaml file?

-David

4

On Tuesday, April 5, 2011 5:53:42 PM UTC-6, David Z. wrote:

Thank you for the response

So basically it* doesn’t* populate a database table? But instead, I
retrieve it directly from the yaml file?

-David

Correct. It appears this file was just intended to store serialized
objects,
no database needed.