== Dibber

A set of tools to tidy up rails seeds.rb files.

Dibber has two compoments:

=== Seeder

Seeder is designed to simplify the process of pulling attributes from
YAML files, and populating ActiveRecord objects with those attributes.

=== ProcessLog

ProcessLog provides Seeder with a simple before and after reporting tool.

=== Installation

Add this to your Gemfile:

    gem 'dibber'

=== Rails Examples

You have a rails app with a Thing model, and you want to seed it with some 
things. Thing instances have the attributes 'name', 'colour', 'size'.
You have a YAML file 'db/seeds/things.yml' that looks like this:

    foo:
      colour: red
      size: large

    bar:
      colour: blue
      size: small

Add this to your 'db/seeds.rb'

    Seeder = Dibber::Seeder
    Seeder.seed :thing
    puts Seeder.report

Then run 'rake db:seed'

Seeder will create two new things. 

You'll then be able to do this:

    thing = Thing.find_by_name(:foo)
    thing.colour    ---> 'red'

=== Outside Rails

Dibber can be used outside of Rails, but in this case you will need to
specify the location of the seed files.

    Seeder.seeds_path = "some/path/to/seeds"

You can also use this technique in Rails if you want to put your seed files
in an alternative folder to 'db/seeds'
 
== Report  
 
Seeder.report outputs a report detailing start and end time, and a log of how
the number of things has changed

== Overwriting existing entries

Seeder#build will not overwrite existing data unless directed to do so. 

   thing.update_attribute(:colour, 'black')
   Seeder.seed :thing
   thing.reload.colour  ----> 'black'

   Seeder.seed(:thing, :overwrite => true)
   thing.reload.colour  ----> 'red'


== Using alternative class and field name mappings

Seeder.seed calls Seeder#build to build the objects defined in the seed files.
You can call the build method directly if your seed file names do not match
the class name:

    Seeder.new(Thing, 'other_things.yml').build

== More examples

Take a look at test/examples/seeds.rb for some more usage examples.

If you clone this app, you can run this example at the project root:

    ruby test/examples/seeds.rb

There is also an example of process log usage:

    ruby test/examples/process_logs.rb