My Rails Project

Airlines

This rails project was a doozy, it was tough but I had a lot of fun building it step by step. The first step I took was to brainstorm on how the relationships will be established. Second, was to add the tables in and give them the appropriate attributes. Third, create the routes and make them work accordingly. Last, to give it a nice design for the user’s eyes and make the app have validations. All of these steps I took made this project feel like a smooth drive to Houston.

Using the Ruby on Rails, fortunately, comes with ActiveRecord, but there’s still some gems I needed to add. Those gems were Bcrypt, omniauth, andoptimist. Bcrypt was for the User account to gain more security. The gem omniauth followed by its inheritors omniauth-facebook and omniauth-google-oauth2 for logging into Facebook or Gmail, because these are the most ubiquitous sites used. optimist simply for the faced that webpacker is not working well for the server. Each of these gems requires a setup after they have been installed, the requirements won’t be discussed in this blog for time purposes.

Brainstorming

The very first step I took was to brainstorm the relationships between five models (User, Ticket, Airline, Flight, and Passenger) in my application. For me to come up with the best relationships to hook these models up, I had to think of a real-life situation at an airport and talk to people. What is the first thing a person must do to register for a flight ticket? They most go online pick an airport (Airline) that has_many flights to buy a ticket that belongs_to a flight and belongs_to a passenger of their choosing. All this can be done after the person creates a User account and gives it a passenger or makes the user have many :passengers. How does the Airline know which flight each passenger is in? The Airline has_many :passengers, through: :flights. What about Flights? Flight has_many :passengers, through: :tickets. And how does the Passenger now which flights they are on? Passenger has_many "flights, through: :tickets. Anymore more questions?

All jokes aside, that was how I developed the relationships between the models.

Add Attributes

Alright, now that the models have associated with each other properly the next step I took was adding the attributes. We all know a User account has a username, password most of the time, an email, so those will be the attributes. How do we set them up? In the data control (db) inside a migrate folder there you create a number file like so, 001_create_users.rb and inside it you should have:

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration[6.0]
   def change
    create_table :users do |t|
      t.string :username
      t.string :password_digest

      t.timestamps
    end
   end
end

The same goes for the other models Passenger, Ticket, Flight, and Airline. In SQL some of these models have a Foreign key you must also include as one of the attributes. Models that belongs_to another are the ones with this special key. Ticket belongs to both passenger and flight, so it will have two foreign keys flight_id and passenger_id.

Create Routes

After setting up the attributes and migrating them to the database, the third step I chose was to create the routes. There are two ways so create routes, you can use the built-in rails resources inside the routes.rb located in the config folder. Or you can build your route like so:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
# rails built-in 
 resources :user, only: [:login, :loggedin, :new, :create, :destroy]

 # Custom users
  get '/login', to: 'users#login'
  post '/login', to: 'users#loggedin'
  get '/signup', to: 'users#new'
  post '/signup', to: 'users#create'
  get '/logout', to: 'users#destroy'
end

Sometimes you may need to use both, in my case I did and I also had to make nested routes work hand and hand with models that are associated with each other. With each route created pointed to: an#action it’s essential that the controller must have matching action method names the same goes for the views.

Validations and Design

Ok now that I have got every previous task setup, the last step was to add restrictions and design. The User Model was the first place to add validations. The attribute username must be validated with uniqueness that way there’re no accounts with the same username. Password needs validates for the minimum to maximum characters it can have. For the other models’ validates all their attributes must be presence except for one, the Passenger and it’s set to optional. Now designing comes into the app, CSS and rearranging content to make it look nice for the user, then the project concluded. Overall, this an experience, I enjoyed it and I learn numerous amounts of tricks.

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