Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Model Diagram for Rails?

I have been kept busy ever since the end of August, working on soccermap.org, a place where you can find and play more pickup soccer games.

Everything went smoothly when I worked on the first version. The application was small, and things are very clear and extremely easy to find. It didn’t take long for me to receive many feature requests, a total of 16 of them from my soccer buddies just from the first use. I was darn happy about it, and before the launch day has barely passed, I was already venturing into the development of the soccermap.org v2.

Two days into the soccermap v2, I found myself with a total of 16+ different models and soon 18+ controllers. With many many-to-many relationships and polymorphic relationships, it’s getting a little over of my head ;-), and my development progress has slowed dramatically, mainly due to the re-adjustments, revisions and refactoring of the earlier work.

My note book by now, is full of scratches, omits, crosses, circles, checks, underlines, lines that fly across 3 pages, and through the back of 1 page. Oh, yeah! Believe me, I am a very creative note taker. ;-)

As the design is gradually becoming more solid and stable, I want to have something that I can visualize the skeletons of the application other than my ‘precious’ note book, so what’s out there?

I looked into the tools that are directly coming from mysql, but I didn’t get much luck there, they either cost money, or not exactly what I wanted. With a last desperate search before I had to leave for work, I hit the ‘RailRoad’:http://railroad.rubyforge.org. Haha, without dying of course ;-)

It’s a really nice tool created just for rails! So it shouldn’t matter if you are using mysql. It should support all of the db that’s supported by rails! Take that!

Within minutes, I was able to create my shining model and controller diagrams without having to bug my wife to jog them all down in a spreadsheet. That’s the last thing I want to do. ;-)

Remember to go to http://www.graphviz.org/ and find out how to install it to your OS first! Without it, you can only get metadata from Activerecord.

Enjoy!

Reference: http://railroad.rubyforge.org/