Yup Dot Com: No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails

No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails

Daniel Butler — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:05:00 -0500

Have you ever had the urge to name a data model in your Ruby on Rails application something obvious, like Action, Table, File, Columns, or Database? Well, don’t. Choosing a name like that might work for you in some cases, but it might fail miserably for someone else using a different database engine (i.e., MySQL verses PostgreSQL verses Oracle).

Think you can remember all the problematic names? Think again. There are at least 974 known keywords which can give you problems. I started with the ReservedWords pages on the Ruby on Rails Wiki, and pulled in and merged all the SQL-92, SQL-99, SQL-2003, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server and ODBC reserved keywords, and put them in one place, mainly for my own future reference.

So what if your data models are about Databases, Tables, Columns, and Files? Simply think of a Good Prefix™, and name all your models accordingly: DaDatabase, DaTable, DaColumn, and DaFile, with resulting table named da_databases, da_tables, da_columns, and da_files. It’s easy, painless, and helps you group similarly-purposed tables and models accordingly, and you don’t have to wrack your brains thinking of synonyms for obvious model names like “Action”. I use Geo- for location-oriented data, Sys- for System-oriented tables, Log- for transactions, and App- for application-oriented tables.

Read on to see the full list …

"No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails" by prl

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:37:28 -0400

thanks for collecting these I got shanked by this twice in one project by using link and attribute…I was hesitant to use a prefix at first…Mylink or whatever because I thought it would confuse rails when it pluralizes class files

"No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails" by fsasf

Tue, 20 May 2008 04:11:27 -0400

"No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails" by rssnewsdigest

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:57:05 -0400

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"No Reservations about Keywords in Ruby on Rails" by tj

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:01:13 -0500