The Power of ActiveRecord and Strange Coincidences

• January 5, 2006

Sorry for those of you coming here expecting non-technical posts, but I did start this thing for technical purposes, after all, and I figured it was about time to return to form.

Tonight I was working on a little side project I’m doing. I needed to pull a bunch of legacy data into a new table for event data. To make this work, I created a set of models that referenced the old tables, using the syntax ActiveRecord provides to override it’s default settings.

After figuring out how to make it work (I had to play with the database connection settings a bit), I decided to take a break and catch up on some blogs. Low and behold, I find that Dave Thomas went and described almost the exact same situation on his blog! I mean, even down to the “Legacy” prefix on his table names. And the reassuring bit is that he arrived at the same solution I did. Gotta love it.