h1. Rails App

Below is a rough set of steps to walk through teaching a beginning course on Rails, Ruby, and web development. The assumption is that the students will have already been through a crash course (a few days) on HTML and CSS. The thinking behind this is that the students will have more fun and be more engaged if they're building something as they're learning.

We start off with the basic Rails steps to give the satisfaction of creating something quickly. The first week and a half is going through some rough Rails concepts. For the last half of the second week we get into some basic programming concepts with Ruby. The idea here is that they've already created something and now we can show them how/what they did. Going forward we'll reference the basic concepts whenever they can be tied back to what is being done in Rails.

We should create labs and hand on assignments whenever possible.

• rails new hackchange_demo

• cd hackchange_demo

• rails s

• open browser and look at http://localhost:3000

• delete file in public/index.html

• comment out root :to => "welcome#index" in routes.rb

• rails g controller welcome ** Will generate tests, ignore those for now

• create app/views/welcome/index.html.erb

• Enter a message (html)

• Inserting <%= Time.now %> in ERB

• Refresh in browser, see it change!

• View page source

• Look at Rails server, explain

• Simple CSS/Rails styling

h2. Feature: Creating a video

• Generate the controller rails g controller videos Question: What is a controller? (request/response cycle) Question: How do we tell the application that the controller exists?

• Creating the resource - add a route: resources :videos ** Explain adding a route - tells the app to route requests to that controller and creates helper functions

• Add link to create a video Open browser, refresh, click link Explain 'action not found' error message ** Look at Rails server, explain

Add new method in controller - explain error about view not found Explain template not found error message

h2. Modeling videos

• How do we store information (a video)?

What information do we want to store about a video? ** Title Submitter name *** Embed code

What is a database? What is a model?

• rails g model video title:string embed:text submitter:string
• Go to migration

h2. Create form

• Create file app/views/videos/new.html.erb

• Write the form

• Add link to home

• Explain 'root' route

• Enter text and submit

• Explain action not found, tie to previous time we saw action not found

• Look at params in Rails server

• Explain or mention HTTP POST

h2. Add create method

• Video.create(params[:video])

• Submit form

• Go to Rails console

• Video.all

• Redirect to root_path

• Submit again, look at Rails server, see what redirect does

h2. Wiring up index

• Welcome controller, add index method
• @videos = Video.all
• Explain variables
• Explain collection
• Add index method, iterator

h2. Edit a video

• Explain route helpers
• Explain REST (GET,PUT,POST,DELETE) and how it relates to routes.
• Add the edit link to the index
• Click on link, see fail
• make note of the URL that it goes to. /videos/1/edit
• Create the edit action
• add code @video = Video.find(params[:id])
• create edit.html.erb. For now we're going to duplicate a lot of stuff to keep things simple. Later we can explain partials by having them refactor the new and edit views to make use of a form partial.
• try to edit a video, submit see error. Explain that Rails magically looks for an "update" action. Talk more about REST.
• create the Update action. First, find the video. We'll come back to how to use before_filters later.
• Go through updating a video
• Add a delete link to the index TODO: why in the hell does this not work as a link?!
• watch it break, implement the action

h2. Basic programming concepts (inspired by Ruby in 20 minutes)

• methods
• classes
• types (arrays, hashes, strings, numbers, symbols)
• flow-control
• iteration
• Should come up with some labs to use these concepts
• Go back through what they've written so far and see how it applies.

h2. Validation

• talk about motivation behind validation
• use validates_presence_of in Video
• update the new form and edit forms to include validation
• update the update and create actions to verify that validation passed
• show the errors on object

h2. Partials

• talk about motivation behind partials
• refactor the new and edit views to use a form partial