2.1.1 A Toy Model for Users

Now we’re ready to start making the app itself. The typical first step when making a web application is to create a data model, which is a representation of the structures needed by our application, including the relationships between them. In our case, the toy app will be a Twitter-style microblog, with only users and short (micro)posts. Thus, we’ll begin with a model for users of the app in this section, and then we’ll add a model for microposts (Section 2.1.2).

There are as many choices for a user data model as there are different registration forms on the Web; for simplicity, we’ll go with a distinctly minimalist approach. Users of our toy app will have a unique identifier called id (of type integer), a publicly viewable name (of type string), and an email address (also of type string) that will double as a unique username. (Note that there is no password attribute at this point, which is part of what makes this app a “toy”. We’ll cover passwords starting in Chapter 6.) A summary of the data model for users appears in Figure 2.2.

As we’ll see starting in Section 6.1.1, the label users in Figure 2.2 corresponds to a table in a database, and the id, name, and email attributes are columns in that table.

2.1.2 A Toy Model for Microposts

Recall from the introduction that a micropost is simply a short post, essentially a generic term for the brand-specific “tweet” (with the prefix “micro” motivated by Twitter’s original description as a “micro-blog”). The core of the micropost data model is even simpler than the one for users: A micropost has only an id and a content field for the micropost’s text (of type text).² There’s an additional complication, though: We want to associate each micropost with a particular user. We’ll accomplish this by recording the user_id of the owner of the post. The results are shown in Figure 2.3.

2. Because microposts are short by design, the string type might actually be big enough to contain them, but using text better expresses our intent, while also giving us greater flexibility should we ever wish to relax the length constraint. Indeed, Twitter’s change from allowing 140 to 280 characters in English-language tweets is a perfect example of why such flexibility is important: A string typically allows 255 (2⁸ − 1) characters, which is big enough for 140-character tweets but not for 280-character ones. Using text allows a unified treatment of both cases.

We’ll see in Section 2.3.3 (and more fully in Chapter 13) how this user_id attribute allows us to succinctly express the notion that a user potentially has many associated microposts.

2.2.1 A User Tour

In generating the Users resource scaffolding in Section 2.2, Rails created a large number of pages for manipulating users. For example, the page for listing all users is at /users, and the page for making a new user is at /users/new. The rest of this section is dedicated to taking a whirlwind tour through these user pages. As we proceed, it may help to refer to Table 2.1, which shows the correspondence between pages and URLs.

We start with the page to show all the users in our application, called index and located at /users. To navigate to this page, click in the address bar of your browser and add “/users” to the end of the root URL (Figure 2.4) so that the full URL is of the form https://www.example.com/users.

As you might expect, initially there are no users at all (Figure 2.5).

To make a new user, we can click on the New User link in Figure 2.5 to visit the new page at /users/new, as shown in Figure 2.6. In Chapter 7, this will become the user signup page.

We can create a user by entering name and email values in the text fields and then clicking the Create User button. The result is the user show page at /users/1, as seen in Figure 2.7. (The green welcome message is accomplished using the flash, which we’ll learn about in Section 7.4.2.) Note that the URL is /users/1; as you might suspect, the number 1 is simply the user’s id attribute from Figure 2.2. In Section 7.1, this page will become the user’s profile page.

To change a user’s information, we click the Edit link to visit the edit page at /users/1/edit (Figure 2.8). By modifying the user information and clicking the Update User button, we arrange to change the information for the user in the toy application (Figure 2.9). (As we’ll see in detail starting in Chapter 6, this user data is stored in a database back-end.) We’ll add user edit/update functionality to the sample application in Section 10.1.

Now we’ll create a second user by revisiting the new page at /users/new and submitting a second set of user information. The resulting user index is shown in Figure 2.10. Section 7.1 will develop the user index into a more polished page for showing all users.

Having shown how to create, show, and edit users, we come finally to destroying them (Figure 2.9). You should verify that clicking on the link in Figure 2.9 destroys the second user, yielding an index page with only one user. (If it doesn’t work, be sure that JavaScript is enabled in your browser; Rails uses JavaScript to issue the request needed to destroy a user.) Section 10.4 adds user deletion to the sample app, taking care to restrict its use to a special class of administrative users.

2.2.2 MVC in Action

Now that we’ve completed a quick overview of the Users resource, let’s examine one particular part of it in the context of the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern introduced in Section 1.2.3. Our strategy will be to describe the results of a typical browser hit—a visit to the user index page at /users—in terms of MVC (Figure 2.12).

Here is a summary of the steps shown in Figure 2.12:

1. The browser issues a request for the /users URL.

2. Rails routes /users to the index action in the Users controller.

3. The index action asks the User model to retrieve all users (User.all).

4. The User model pulls all the users from the database.

5. The User model returns the list of users to the controller.

6. The controller captures the users in the @users variable, which is passed to the index view.

7. The view uses embedded Ruby to render the page as HTML.

8. The controller passes the HTML back to the browser.⁴

   4. Some references indicate that the view returns the HTML directly to the browser (via a web server such as Apache or Nginx). Regardless of the implementation details, I find it helpful to think of the controller as a central hub through which all the application’s information flows.

Now let’s take a look at the above steps in more detail. We start with a request issued from the browser—i.e., the result of typing a URL in the address bar or clicking on a link (Step 1 in Figure 2.12). This request hits the Rails router (Step 2), which dispatches the request to the proper controller action based on the URL (and, as we’ll see in Box 3.2, the type of request). The code to create the mapping of user URLs to controller actions for the Users resource appears in Listing 2.6. This code effectively sets up the table of URL/action pairs seen in Table 2.1. (The strange notation :users is a symbol, which we’ll learn about in Section 4.3.3.)

Listing 2.6: The Rails routes, with a rule for the Users resource.
config/routes.rb

Click here to view code image

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :users
  root 'application#hello'
end

While we’re looking at the routes file, let’s take a moment to associate the root route with the users index, so that “slash” goes to /users. Recall from Listing 2.3 that we added the root route

root 'application#hello'

so that the root route went to the hello action in the Application controller. In the present case, we want to use the index action in the Users controller, which we can arrange using the code shown in Listing 2.7.

Listing 2.7: Adding a root route for users.
config/routes.rb

Click here to view code image

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :users
  root 'users#index'
end

A controller contains a collection of related actions, and the pages from the tour in Section 2.2.1 correspond to actions in the Users controller. The controller generated by the scaffolding is shown schematically in Listing 2.8. Note the code class UsersController < ApplicationController, which is an example of a Ruby class with inheritance. (We’ll discuss inheritance briefly in Section 2.3.4 and cover both subjects in more detail in Section 4.4.)

Listing 2.8: The Users controller in schematic form.
app/controllers/users_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class UsersController  < ApplicationController
  .
  .
  .
  def index
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def show
    .
    .
    .
  end


  def new
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def edit
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def create
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def update
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def destroy
    .
    .
    .
  end
end

You might notice that there are more actions than there are pages; the index, show, new, and edit actions all correspond to pages from Section 2.2.1, but there are additional create, update, and destroy actions as well. These actions don’t typically render pages (although they can); instead, their main purpose is to modify information about users in the database.

This full suite of controller actions, summarized in Table 2.2, represents the implementation of the REST architecture in Rails (Box 2.2), which is based on the ideas of representational state transfer identified and named by computer scientist Roy Fielding.⁵ Note from Table 2.2 that there is some overlap in the URLs; for example, both the user show action and the update action correspond to the URL /users/1. The difference between them is the HTTP request method they respond to. We’ll learn more about HTTP request methods starting in Section 3.3.

5. Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000.

To examine the relationship between the Users controller and the User model, let’s focus on the index action, shown in Listing 2.9. (Learning how to read code even when you don’t fully understand it is an important aspect of technical sophistication (Box 1.2).)

Listing 2.9: The simplified user index action for the toy application.
app/controllers/users_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  .
  .
  .
  def index
    @users = User.all
  end
  .
  .
  .
end

This index action has the line @users = User.all (Step 3 in Figure 2.12), which asks the User model to retrieve a list of all the users from the database (Step 4), and then places them in the variable @users (pronounced “at-users”) (Step 5).

The User model itself appears in Listing 2.10. Although it is rather plain, it comes equipped with a large amount of functionality because of inheritance (Section 2.3.4 and Section 4.4). In particular, by using the Rails library called Active Record, the code in Listing 2.10 arranges for User.all to return all the users in the database.

Listing 2.10: The User model for the toy application.
app/models/user.rb

Click here to view code image

class User < ApplicationRecord
end

Once the @users variable is defined, the controller calls the view (Step 6), shown in Listing 2.11. Variables that start with the @ sign, called instance variables, are automatically available in the views; in this case, the index.html.erb view in Listing 2.11 iterates through the @users list and outputs a line of HTML for each one. (Remember, you aren’t supposed to understand this code right now. It is shown only for purposes of illustration.)

Listing 2.11: The view for the users index.
app/views/users/index.html.erb

Click here to view code image

<p style="color: green"><%= notice %></p>

<h1>Users</h1>

<div id="users">
  <% @users.each do |user| %>
    <%= render user %>
    <p>
      <%= link_to "Show this user", user %>
    </p>
  <% end %>
</div>

<%= link_to "New user", new_user_path %>

The view converts its contents to HTML (Step 7), which is then returned by the controller to the browser for display (Step 8).

2.2.3 Weaknesses of This Users Resource

Though good for getting a general overview of Rails, the scaffold Users resource suffers from a number of severe weaknesses.

• No data validations. Our User model accepts data such as blank names and invalid email addresses without complaint.

• No authentication. We have no notion of logging in or out, and no way to prevent any user from performing any operation.

• No tests. This isn’t technically true—the scaffolding includes rudimentary tests—but the generated tests don’t test for data validation, authentication, or any other custom requirements.

• No style or layout. There is no consistent site styling or navigation.

• No real understanding. If you understand the scaffold code, you probably shouldn’t be reading this book.

2.3.1 A Micropost Microtour

As with the Users resource, we’ll generate scaffold code for the Microposts resource using rails generate scaffold, in this case implementing the data model from Figure 2.3:⁶

6. As with the User scaffold, the scaffold generator for microposts follows the singular convention of Rails models; thus, we have generate Micropost.

Click here to view code image

 $ rails generate scaffold Micropost content:text user_id:integer

      invoke  active_record
      create    db/migrate/<timestamp>_create_microposts.rb
      create    app/models/micropost.rb
      invoke    test_unit
      create      test/models/micropost_test.rb
      create      test/fixtures/microposts.yml

      invoke  resource_route
       route    resources :microposts
      invoke  scaffold_controller
      create    app/controllers/microposts_controller.rb
      invoke    erb
      create      app/views/microposts
      create      app/views/microposts/index.html.erb
      create      app/views/microposts/edit.html.erb
      create      app/views/microposts/show.html.erb
      create      app/views/microposts/new.html.erb
      create      app/views/microposts/_form.html.erb
      invoke    test_unit
      create      test/controllers/microposts_controller_test.rb
      create      test/system/microposts_test.rb
      invoke    helper
      create      app/helpers/microposts_helper.rb
      invoke      test_unit
      invoke    jbuilder
      create      app/views/microposts/index.json.jbuilder
      create      app/views/microposts/show.json.jbuilder
      create      app/views/microposts/_micropost.json.jbuilder

To update our database with the new data model, we need to run a migration as in Section 2.2:

Click here to view code image

 $ rails db:migrate

 ==  CreateMicroposts: migrating ===============================================
 -- create_table(:microposts)
    -> 0.0023s
 ==  CreateMicroposts: migrated (0.0026s) ======================================

Now we are in a position to create microposts in the same way we created users in Section 2.2.1. As you might guess, the scaffold generator has updated the Rails routes file with a rule for the Microposts resource, as seen in Listing 2.12.⁷ As with users, the resources :microposts routing rule maps micropost URLs to actions in the Microposts controller, as seen in Table 2.3.

7. The scaffold code may have extra blank lines compared to Listing 2.12. This is not a cause for concern, as Ruby ignores such extra space.

Listing 2.12: The Rails routes, with a new rule for the Microposts resource.
config/routes.rb

Click here to view code image

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :microposts
  resources :users
  root 'users#index'
end

The Microposts controller itself appears in schematic form in Listing 2.13. Note that, apart from having MicropostsController in place of UsersController, Listing 2.13 is identical to the code in Listing 2.8. This is a reflection of the REST architecture common to both resources.

Listing 2.13: The Microposts controller in schematic form.
app/controllers/microposts_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class MicropostsController < ApplicationController
  .
  .
  .
  def index
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def show
    .
    .
    .

  end

  def new
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def edit
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def create
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def update
    .
    .
    .
  end

  def destroy
    .
    .
    .
  end
end

To make some actual microposts, we click on New Micropost on the micropost index page (Figure 2.13) and enter information at the new microposts page, /microposts/new, as seen in Figure 2.14.

At this point, go ahead and create a micropost or two, taking care to make sure that at least one has a user_id of 1 to match the id of the first user created in Section 2.2.1. The result should look something like Figure 2.15.

2.3.2 Putting the micro in Microposts

Any micropost worthy of the name should have some means of enforcing the length of the post. Implementing this constraint in Rails is easy with validations; to accept microposts with at most 140 characters (à la the original design of Twitter), we use a length validation. At this point, you should open the file app/models/micropost.rb in your text editor or IDE and fill it with the contents of Listing 2.14.

Listing 2.14: Constraining microposts to be at most 140 characters.
app/models/micropost.rb

Click here to view code image

class Micropost < ApplicationRecord
  validates :content, length: { maximum: 140 }
end

The code in Listing 2.14 may look rather mysterious—we’ll cover validations more thoroughly starting in Section 6.2—but its effects are readily apparent if we go to the new micropost page and enter more than 140 characters for the content of the post. As seen in Figure 2.16, Rails renders error messages indicating that the micropost’s content is too long. (We’ll learn more about error messages in Section 7.3.3.)

2.3.3 A User has_many Microposts

One of the most powerful features of Rails is the ability to form associations between different data models. In the case of our User model, each user potentially has many microposts. We can express this in code by updating the User and Micropost models as in Listing 2.15 and Listing 2.16.

Listing 2.15: A user has many microposts.
app/models/user.rb

Click here to view code image

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :microposts
end

Listing 2.16: A micropost belongs to a user.
app/models/micropost.rb

Click here to view code image

class Micropost < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
  validates :content, length: { maximum: 140 }
end

We can visualize the result of this association in Figure 2.17. Because of the user_id column in the microposts table, Rails (using Active Record) can infer the microposts associated with each user.

In Chapter 13 and Chapter 14, we will use the association of users and microposts both to display all of a user’s microposts and to construct a Twitter-like micropost feed. For now, we can examine the implications of the user–micropost association by using the console, which is a useful tool for interacting with Rails applications. We first invoke the console with rails console at the command line, and then retrieve the first user from the database using User.first (putting the results in the variable first_user), as shown in Listing 2.17.⁸ (I include exit in the last line just to demonstrate how to exit the console. On most systems, you can also use Ctrl-D for the same purpose.)⁹

8. Your console prompt might be something like 3.1.2 :001 >, but the examples use >> since Ruby versions will vary.

9. As in the case of Ctrl-C, the capital “D” refers to the key on the keyboard, not the capital letter, so you don’t have to hold down the Shift key along with the Ctrl key.

Listing 2.17: Investigating the state of the application using the Rails console.

Click here to view code image

$ rails console
>> first_user = User.first
User Load (0.1ms) SELECT "users".* FROM "users" ORDER BY "users"."id"
ASC LIMIT ? [["LIMIT", 1]]
 =>
>> first_user
 =>
#<User:0x00007ffbf1331658
 id: 1,
 name: "Michael Hartl",
 email: "[email protected] ",
 created_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:23:31.441663000 UTC +00:00,
 updated_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:25:04.172206000 UTC +00:00>


#<User:0x00007ffbf1331658
>> first_user.microposts
  Micropost Load (0.2ms) SELECT "microposts".* FROM "microposts"
  WHERE "microposts"."user_id" = ? [["user_id", 1]]
 =>
[#<Micropost:0x00007ffbf16807a0
  id: 1,
  content: "First micropost!",
  user_id: 1,
  created_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:02.263125000 UTC +00:00,
  updated_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:02.263125000 UTC +00:00>,
 #<Micropost:0x00007ffbf1653a70
  id: 2,
  content: "Second micropost",
  user_id: 1,
  created_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:14.079131000 UTC +00:00,
  updated_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:14.079131000 UTC +00:00>]
>> micropost = first_user.microposts.first
 =>
#<Micropost:0x00007ffbf16807a0
...
>> micropost
 =>
#<Micropost:0x00007ffbf16807a0
 id: 1,
 content: "First micropost!",
 user_id: 1,
 created_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:02.263125000 UTC +00:00,
 updated_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:46:02.263125000 UTC +00:00>
>> micropost.user
 =>
#<User:0x00007ffbf1331658
 id: 1,post:0
 name: "Michael Hartl",
 email: "[email protected] ",
 created_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:23:31.441663000 UTC +00:00,
 updated_at: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:25:04.172206000 UTC +00:00>
>> exit

There’s a lot going on in Listing 2.17, and teasing out the relevant parts is a good exercise in technical sophistication (Box 1.2). The output includes the actual return values, which are raw Ruby objects, as well as the Structured Query Language (SQL) code that produced them.

In addition to retrieving the first user with User.first, Listing 2.17 shows two other things: (1) how to access the first user’s microposts using the code first_user.microposts, which automatically returns all the microposts with user_id equal to the id of first_user (in this case, 1); and (2) how to return the user corresponding to a particular post using micropost.user. We’ll learn much more about the Ruby involved in Listing 2.17 in Chapter 4, and more about the association facilities in Active Record in Chapter 13 and Chapter 14.

class Micropost < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
  validates :content, length: { maximum: 140 },
                      presence: true
end

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :microposts
  validates FILL_IN, presence: true    # Replace FILL_IN with the right code.
  validates FILL_IN, presence: true    # Replace FILL_IN with the right code.
end

2.3.4 Inheritance Hierarchies

We end our discussion of the toy application with a brief description of the controller and model class hierarchies in Rails. This discussion will only make much sense if you have some experience with object-oriented programming (OOP), particularly classes. Don’t worry if it’s confusing for now; we’ll discuss these ideas more thoroughly in Section 4.4.

We start with the inheritance structure for models. Comparing Listing 2.20 and Listing 2.21, we see that both the User model and the Micropost model inherit (via the left angle bracket <) from ApplicationRecord, which in turn inherits from ActiveRecord::Base, which is the base class for models provided by Active Record; a diagram summarizing this relationship appears in Figure 2.20. It is by inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base that our model objects gain the ability to communicate with the database, treat the database columns as Ruby attributes, and so on.

Listing 2.20: The User class, highlighting inheritance.
app/models/user.rb

Click here to view code image

class User < ApplicationRecord
  .
  .
  .
end

Listing 2.21: The Micropost class, highlighting inheritance.
app/models/micropost.rb

Click here to view code image

class Micropost < ApplicationRecord
  .
  .
  .
end

The inheritance structure for controllers is essentially the same as that for models. Comparing Listing 2.22 and Listing 2.23, we see that both the Users controller and the Microposts controller inherit from the Application controller. Examining Listing 2.24, we see that ApplicationController itself inherits from ActionController::Base, which is the base class for controllers provided by the Rails library Action Pack. The relationships between these classes are illustrated in Figure 2.21.

Listing 2.22: The UsersController class, highlighting inheritance.
app/controllers/users_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  .
  .
  .
end

Listing 2.23: The MicropostsController class, highlighting inheritance.
app/controllers/microposts_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class MicropostsController < ApplicationController
  .
  .
  .
end

Listing 2.24: The ApplicationController class, highlighting inheritance.
app/controllers/application_controller.rb

Click here to view code image

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  .
  .
  .
end

As with model inheritance, both the Users and Microposts controllers gain a large amount of functionality by inheriting from a base class (in this case, ActionController::Base), including the ability to manipulate model objects, filter inbound HTTP requests, and render views as HTML. Since all Rails controllers inherit from ApplicationController, rules defined in the Application controller automatically apply to every action in the application. For example, in Section 9.1 we’ll see how to include helpers for logging in and logging out of all of the sample application’s controllers.

2.3.5 Deploying the Toy App

With the completion of the Microposts resource, now is a good time to push the repository up to GitHub:

Click here to view code image

$ git status    # It's a good habit to check the status before adding
$ git add -A
$ git commit -m "Finish toy app"
$ git push

Ordinarily, you should make smaller, more frequent commits, but for the purposes of this chapter a single big commit at the end is fine.

At this point, you can also deploy the toy app to Heroku as in Section 1.4:

$ git push heroku

(This assumes you created the Heroku app in Section 2.1. Otherwise, you should run heroku create and then git push heroku main. Also recall from Section 1.4.1 that you can get the Web URL for your Heroku app by running heroku apps:info (Listing 1.26).)

At this point, visiting the page at Heroku yields an error message, as shown in Figure 2.22.

We can track down the problem by inspecting the Heroku logs:

$ heroku logs

Scrolling up in the logs, you should see a line that includes something like this:

Click here to view code image

ActionView::Template::Error (PG::UndefinedTable: ERROR: relation "users" does
not exist

This is a big hint that there is a missing users table. Luckily, we learned how to handle that way back in Listing 2.5: All we need to do is run the database migrations (which will create the microposts table as well).

The way to execute this sort of command at Heroku is to prefix the usual Rails command with heroku run, like this:

$ heroku run rails db:migrate

This updates the database at Heroku with the user and micropost data models as required. After running the migration, you should be able to use the toy app in production, with a real PostgreSQL database back-end (Figure 2.23).¹⁰

10. The production database should work without any additional configuration, but in fact some configuration is recommended by the official Heroku documentation. We’ll take care of this detail in Section 7.5.3.

Finally, if you completed the exercises in Section 2.3.3, you will have to remove the code to display the first user’s micropost in order to get the app to load properly. In this case, simply delete the offending code, make another commit, and push again to Heroku.

2.4.1 What We Learned in This Chapter

• Scaffolding automatically creates code to model data and interact with it through the web.

• Scaffolding is good for getting started quickly but is bad for understanding.

• Rails uses the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for structuring web applications.

• As interpreted by Rails, the REST architecture includes a standard set of URLs and controller actions for interacting with data models.

• Rails supports data validations to place constraints on the values of data model attributes.

• Rails comes with built-in functions for defining associations between different data models.

• We can interact with Rails applications at the command line using the Rails console.