Annotator

If you just want to have column descriptions in your model file, annotate_models should suite you well. Annotator will help you if you want to also keep your own comments about these columns.

Ever wondered what the heck is that column used for?

Usage

In your Gemfile:

gem 'annotator'

Then in app directory:

rake annotate

voila!

Usage (verbose)

Let’s say you have a Foo model:

# My Foo model, it's awesome

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base

Make sure your working tree is clean (it’s suggested tu put annotations in separate commits so you can easily review changes done by annotator before commiting and you can always easily revert them all) and run:

rake annotate

Then it should become something like:

# My Foo model, it's awesome

# Attributes:
# * id [integer, primary, not null, limit=4] - primary key
# * body [text] - TODO: document me
# * created_at [datetime] - creation time
# * title [string] - TODO: document me

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base

Now you can edit these TODOs and run it again, nothing happens. But when you add new column and run it again:

# My Foo model, it's awesome

# Attributes:
# * id [integer, primary, not null, limit=4] - primary key
# * body [text] - there we store foo complicated body
# * created_at [datetime] - creation time
# * some_number [integer, limit=4] - TODO: document me
# * title [string]

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base

Of course similar thing happens when you remove column or change it’s type.

Some actually useful information

it recognizes it’s own block by “Attributes:” and then punctation list
if you don’t want it to update anything, put “Attributes(nodoc):” instead
for some fields like title above you can just skip description including dash sometimes name is just obvious enough
multiline comments are ok
generating initial descriptions it understands things like
- belongs_to association columns
- devise columns
- paperclip colums

you can run it without rails (if you use sinatra for example), just add something like this to your Rakefile

task :annotate do
  require 'annotator'
  Annotator.run(File.join(Dir.pwd, "lib", "models"))
end

Contributions are very much welcome.

Todos

since name does not have “model” in it, we could possibly use “rake routes” to annotate controller actions, not sure if it’s worth it

Credits

Kacper Cieśla @ Tech-Angels - www.tech-angels.com

Contributions:

Lucas Florio - made it working without rails
vanyak - re-annotating belongs_to associations

License

Annotator is released under the MIT license.