This is homework 3 and we are getting to the interesting part. We are getting into migrations (changes to the database), and models (our way with interacting with the data in our database). To get started fork this repo onto your own account and clone it from your forked repo just like you did hw2.

In the end all we want is Users, Cats, and Todos with the following specifications in the database, to have models defined for them, AND to submit answers to the google doc. We are going with the very basic TODO app that pretty common in tutorials everywhere.

username: A string that contains the username of the User

email: A string that contains the email of the User

age: An integer that contains the age of the User

name: A string that contains the name of the cat.

tasks: A string of the task that needs to be done

finished: A boolean on whether or not it's been finished

Have a method that allows the cat to "Meow", which means give it a method that puts a "Meow" into the console.

Finally what we want to do is populate the home page with all the Users, Cats, and Todos

You probably want to look at the repo to see what's been done for you. I would especially check app/models and db/migrations. If you want to try doing it without the walkthrough below I would recommend it because I feel that you learn alot about these kinds of things through trial and error. Remember to run your migrations with

rake db:migrate

in order to make the changes to your database.

So one of the first things you should notice is that there is already a migration to create a cats table with a name field of type string in it, but you don't have a model associated with it. First define the model in app/models. Then create a method called meow (you can call it whatever really) and just have it puts meow to the console. Save the file and fire up your rails console and check to see if you can create a new cat and call its meow method. If it prints "meow" you are good!

$ rails console
> c = Cat.new
> c.meow # Should print out meow

So for User we can see a migration was made to create a user with a name and an email, and we already have a model. We need to do is add an integer called age to our Users table. Check our the rails documentation to see how to do this. Run the migration and check to see if your User now has an age.

$ rails console
> u = User.new
> u.age # Should not error

Now try and see if you can rename the column from name to username. How to do it should be within the above documentation. Do a similar check to see if it worked!

There isn't anything here for todos! This is a perfect time to see how easy it is to create a migration and model in seconds with one command line action. Check this out to see how. Run similar actions to the above two to check to see if it worked!

Combining all the stuff you learned from the first few lectures make a home page display all the users, todos, and cats in your database. First you have to create a pages controller and a home method within it that stores models in an instance variable (If you don't know how to get all the records for a model try in your console 'User.all'). Route that method to the root. Create a pages folder within the views folder and create the view that will show the models that are stored in the instance variable that was defined in the controller. There isn't any particular way we want you to format this. Now start creating Users, Todos, and Cats in your database and see them on your home page!

If you are bored try to split into two lists the finished task and the unfinished tasks.

Go to the top of the app and run

git add .
git commit -am "Models!"

and push it up to a repo on your Github account. If you forked this repo and cloned the fork on your own repository you should be able to do

git push origin HEAD

and submit this form.