StaticData

StaticData is a Rails plugin that lets you easily manage fixed data that you want to always have in your database, and is primarily useful for pre-populating lookup tables and the like. It consists of a simple framework for describing your static data and a Rake task for ensuring that your static data is installed in your database.

While you can use migrations to do this, referencing models in migrations can get you into trouble, and it can be awkward to update static data in migrations later.

It doesn't do much, but it's awfully handy to have a simple way of adding lookup table data to your database. And with StaticData, you can easily add new data and make it easy for to get everyone's database in sync with the latest static data (even production).

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'static-data'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install static-data

Setting up Static Data for a table

Using the Generator

Run the generator with the name of the model you want to build static data for (in the example below, ImageType):

rails generate static_data:create ImageType

By Hand

Create a db/static-data directory in your app:

mkdir db/static-data

Create a file for the model that you want to store static data for, named after the model. The class name should match the model name, but with the word "Static" prepended (eg: Static<ModelName>). Implement two class methods, columns and rows.

cat > db/static-data/image_type.rb <<EOF
# For a model named ImageType:
class StaticImageType < StaticData::Base
  def self.columns
  end

  def self.row
  end
end

Describe your Static Data

The columns method should return the names of the columns in the order their data appears in the rows

# For a model named ImageType:
class StaticImageType < StaticData::Base
  def self.columns
    [:name, :mime_type, :extension]
  end

  def self.row
  [
    ['PNG', 'image/png', 'png'],
    ['JPEG', 'image/jpeg', 'jpg'],
  ]
  end
end

Getting Your Static Data into the Database

Update your database with your static data:

rake static-data:update

Or replace all existing data in the static data tables with your static data:

rake static-data:install

Enjoy!

Limitations

StaticData isn't designed for large volumes of data and performance may be poor on large static data sets.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request