Ruby-on-rails – Seeding users with Devise in Ruby on Rails

.nil? can be used on any object and is true if the object is nil.

.empty? can be used on strings, arrays and hashes and returns true if:

• String length == 0
• Array length == 0
• Hash length == 0

Running .empty? on something that is nil will throw a NoMethodError.

That is where .blank? comes in. It is implemented by Rails and will operate on any object as well as work like .empty? on strings, arrays and hashes.

nil.blank? == true
false.blank? == true
[].blank? == true
{}.blank? == true
"".blank? == true
5.blank? == false
0.blank? == false

.blank? also evaluates true on strings which are non-empty but contain only whitespace:

"  ".blank? == true
"  ".empty? == false

Rails also provides .present?, which returns the negation of .blank?.

Array gotcha: blank? will return false even if all elements of an array are blank. To determine blankness in this case, use all? with blank?, for example:

[ nil, '' ].blank? == false
[ nil, '' ].all? &:blank? == true 

rename_column :table, :old_column, :new_column

You'll probably want to create a separate migration to do this. (Rename FixColumnName as you will.):

script/generate migration FixColumnName
# creates  db/migrate/xxxxxxxxxx_fix_column_name.rb

Then edit the migration to do your will:

# db/migrate/xxxxxxxxxx_fix_column_name.rb
class FixColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end

  def self.down
    # rename back if you need or do something else or do nothing
  end
end

For Rails 3.1 use:

While, the up and down methods still apply, Rails 3.1 receives a change method that "knows how to migrate your database and reverse it when the migration is rolled back without the need to write a separate down method".

See "Active Record Migrations" for more information.

rails g migration FixColumnName

class FixColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end
end

If you happen to have a whole bunch of columns to rename, or something that would have required repeating the table name over and over again:

rename_column :table_name, :old_column1, :new_column1
rename_column :table_name, :old_column2, :new_column2
...

You could use change_table to keep things a little neater:

class FixColumnNames < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_table :table_name do |t|
      t.rename :old_column1, :new_column1
      t.rename :old_column2, :new_column2
      ...
    end
  end
end

Then just db:migrate as usual or however you go about your business.

For Rails 4:

While creating a Migration for renaming a column, Rails 4 generates a change method instead of up and down as mentioned in the above section. The generated change method is:

$ > rails g migration ChangeColumnName

which will create a migration file similar to:

class ChangeColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end
end