Smart Factory Ruby on Rails exercises

This set of exercises will lead you through building an app that allows a bicycle shop's employees to track orders for fulfilling custom bicycle orders.

Development Setup

Fork the project

Use the 'Fork' button on the upper right of the project's github page.

Check out a local copy:

$ git clone git@github.com:<your_github_username>/ruby-on-rails-exercises.git

Install the dependencies

$ cd ruby-on-rails-exercises
$ bundle install

Exercise Set #1

1. Before writing any code, we would like to make a configuration change. Most projects we see use the Haml templating language, rather than Rails' default ERB. So, let's configure the app to use Haml. Hint: there are two main ways to get Haml working with Rails, and the more fully featured of the two will make future steps easier.
2. Our initial requirements are simply to allow creating and listing orders with a few fields for each order: customer name, customer email, description, price, and the date that the bike was paid for. Since this sounds like standard CRUD, use rails' scaffold generator to get started. You used the scaffold generator already if you followed the pre-class install instructions. For a review of how it works, just run $ rails g scaffold from the command line of your project directory.
3. Now that the generator has defined a table, it's time to set up the database: $ rake db:migrate. If your server isn't already running, start it: $ rails s
4. Point your web browser to http://localhost:3000/orders, and create a few orders. They're pretty hard to read in the listing, aren't they? We've put some simple CSS together that should help with that, and stuck it in lib/orders.css.scss. Put those rules in an appropriate place so that Rails knows about them, and make any needed changes to the generated HTML so that it gets used. No worries if you aren't familiar with CSS, just ask and we'll give you a few hints about what you need to do.
5. The default UI for entering the date that the order was paid for doesn't allow the field to be left blank, which is necessary in case the customer hasn't paid yet. Change it to a text input, so that it can be left blank until the order is paid for.
6. As the app stands now, it's possible to create orders that are missing vital information. Let's fix that -- make the customer name, customer email, description, and price required.