One of my clients has a huge application with no test suite. I am helping the company migrate to Rails 2.3 as well as remove some bottlenecks from their code. I needed to convert around 10 look-up tables to YAML’s so that I could load the data as fixtures and test the application properly as I make changes. I scraped together pieces of code from the web and came up with this:

namespace :db do
  namespace :fixtures do
 
    desc 'Create YAML test fixtures from data in an existing database.  
    Defaults to development database.  Set RAILS_ENV to override.'
    task :dump => :environment do
      sql  = "SELECT * FROM %s"
      skip_tables = ["schema_info"]
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(RAILS_ENV)
      tables=ENV['TABLES'].split(',')
      tables ||= (ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables - skip_tables)
 
      tables.each do |table_name|
        i = "000"
        File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/test/fixtures/#{table_name}.yml", 'w') do |file|
          data = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all(sql % table_name)
          file.write data.inject({}) { |hash, record|
            hash["#{table_name}_#{i.succ!}"] = record
            hash
          }.to_yaml
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

To use, put this code in a file somewhere like RAILS_ROOT/lib/tasks/util/table_to_yml.rake and execute something like:

rake db:fixtures:dump TABLES=lookup_table_1,lookup_table_2,...,lookup_table_n

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Converting Table Data to YAML for Testing in Ruby on Rails

By Tony | Published: December 9, 2009

This entry was posted in Software and tagged database, rails, rake, rubyonrails, tasks, testing, utilities, yaml. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Converting Table Data to YAML for Testing in Ruby on Rails

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