== Welcome to My Small Charity

This is a simple Ruby on Rails application for managing a small charity.

I'm part of several small charities, and I feel the need for some good tools. Unfortunately, existing tools are expensive and not suited for my needs.

I thus write my own application. It will include :

• a good CRM (I know what I mean)
• a distributed accounting module with currency support

Maybe, if I have time, I will add some collaborative features.

4. Follow the guidelines to start developing your application. You can find the following resources handy:

• The Getting Started Guide: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book: http://www.railstutorial.org/

== Debugging Rails

Sometimes your application goes wrong. Fortunately there are a lot of tools that will help you debug it and get it back on the rails.

First area to check is the application log files. Have "tail -f" commands running on the server.log and development.log. Rails will automatically display debugging and runtime information to these files. Debugging info will also be shown in the browser on requests from 127.0.0.1.

You can also log your own messages directly into the log file from your code using the Ruby logger class from inside your controllers. Example:

class WeblogController < ActionController::Base def destroy @weblog = Weblog.find(params[:id]) @weblog.destroy logger.info("#{Time.now} Destroyed Weblog ID ##{@weblog.id}!") end end

The result will be a message in your log file along the lines of:

Mon Oct 08 14:22:29 +1000 2007 Destroyed Weblog ID #1!

More information on how to use the logger is at http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/

Also, Ruby documentation can be found at http://www.ruby-lang.org/. There are several books available online as well:

• Programming Ruby: http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ (Pickaxe)
• Learn to Program: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ (a beginners guide)

These two books will bring you up to speed on the Ruby language and also on programming in general.

== Debugger

Debugger support is available through the debugger command when you start your Mongrel or WEBrick server with --debugger. This means that you can break out of execution at any point in the code, investigate and change the model, and then, resume execution! You need to install ruby-debug to run the server in debugging mode. With gems, use sudo gem install ruby-debug. Example:

class WeblogController < ActionController::Base def index @posts = Post.find(:all) debugger end end

So the controller will accept the action, run the first line, then present you with a IRB prompt in the server window. Here you can do things like:

@posts.inspect => "[#<Post:0x14a6be8 @attributes={"title"=>nil, "body"=>nil, "id"=>"1"}>, #<Post:0x14a6620 @attributes={"title"=>"Rails", "body"=>"Only ten..", "id"=>"2"}>]" @posts.first.title = "hello from a debugger" => "hello from a debugger"

...and even better, you can examine how your runtime objects actually work:

f = @posts.first => #<Post:0x13630c4 @attributes={"title"=>nil, "body"=>nil, "id"=>"1"}> f. Display all 152 possibilities? (y or n)

Finally, when you're ready to resume execution, you can enter "cont".

== Console

The console is a Ruby shell, which allows you to interact with your application's domain model. Here you'll have all parts of the application configured, just like it is when the application is running. You can inspect domain models, change values, and save to the database. Starting the script without arguments will launch it in the development environment.

To start the console, run rails console from the application directory.

Options:

• Passing the -s, --sandbox argument will rollback any modifications made to the database.
• Passing an environment name as an argument will load the corresponding environment. Example: rails console production.

To reload your controllers and models after launching the console run reload!

More information about irb can be found at: link:http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/irb.html

== dbconsole

You can go to the command line of your database directly through rails dbconsole. You would be connected to the database with the credentials defined in database.yml. Starting the script without arguments will connect you to the development database. Passing an argument will connect you to a different database, like rails dbconsole production. Currently works for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite 3.

== Description of Contents

The default directory structure of a generated Ruby on Rails application:

|-- app | |-- controllers | |-- helpers | |-- mailers | |-- models | -- views | -- layouts |-- config | |-- environments | |-- initializers | -- locales |-- db |-- doc |-- lib | -- tasks |-- log |-- public | |-- images | |-- javascripts | -- stylesheets |-- script |-- test | |-- fixtures | |-- functional | |-- integration | |-- performance | -- unit |-- tmp | |-- cache | |-- pids | |-- sessions | -- sockets -- vendor `-- plugins

app Holds all the code that's specific to this particular application.

app/controllers Holds controllers that should be named like weblogs_controller.rb for automated URL mapping. All controllers should descend from ApplicationController which itself descends from ActionController::Base.

app/models Holds models that should be named like post.rb. Models descend from ActiveRecord::Base by default.

app/views Holds the template files for the view that should be named like weblogs/index.html.erb for the WeblogsController#index action. All views use eRuby syntax by default.

app/views/layouts Holds the template files for layouts to be used with views. This models the common header/footer method of wrapping views. In your views, define a layout using the layout :default and create a file named default.html.erb. Inside default.html.erb, call <% yield %> to render the view using this layout.

app/helpers Holds view helpers that should be named like weblogs_helper.rb. These are generated for you automatically when using generators for controllers. Helpers can be used to wrap functionality for your views into methods.

config Configuration files for the Rails environment, the routing map, the database, and other dependencies.

db Contains the database schema in schema.rb. db/migrate contains all the sequence of Migrations for your schema.

doc This directory is where your application documentation will be stored when generated using rake doc:app

lib Application specific libraries. Basically, any kind of custom code that doesn't belong under controllers, models, or helpers. This directory is in the load path.

public The directory available for the web server. Contains subdirectories for images, stylesheets, and javascripts. Also contains the dispatchers and the default HTML files. This should be set as the DOCUMENT_ROOT of your web server.

script Helper scripts for automation and generation.

test Unit and functional tests along with fixtures. When using the rails generate command, template test files will be generated for you and placed in this directory.

vendor External libraries that the application depends on. Also includes the plugins subdirectory. If the app has frozen rails, those gems also go here, under vendor/rails/. This directory is in the load path.