Plain Record

Plaint Record is a data persistence, which use human editable and readable plain text files. It’s ideal for static generated sites, like blog or homepage.

If you want to write another static website generator, you don’t need to write another file parser – you can use Plain Record.

How To

For example we will create simple blog storage with posts and comments.

Add Plain Record to your application Gemfile:
```
gem "plain_record"
```
Set storage root – dir, which will contain all data files:
```
PlainRecord.root = 'data/'
```

Create Post class, include Plain::Resource module, set glob pattern to posts files and define fields:

class Post
  include Plain::Resource

  entry_in '*/post.md'

  virtual :name,     in_filepath(1)
  virtual :comments, many(Comment)
  field   :title     default("Untitled")
  field   :tags      default([])
  field   :created   type(Time)
  text    :summary
  text    :content
end

Create new post file data/first/post.md. Fields will be saved as YAML and text will be placed as plain text, which is separated by 3 dashes:
```
title: My first post
tags: test, first
---
It is short post summary.
---
And this is big big post text.
In several lines.
```

Also you can use files with list of entries. For example, comments:

class Comment
  include Plain::Resource

  list_in '*/comments.yml'

  virtual :post_name, in_filepath(1)
  virtual :post,      one(Post)
  field   :author
  field   :comment
end

You can’t use text fields in list files.

List files is a just YAML array. For example, data/first/comments.yml:

- author: Anonymous
  comment: I like it!
- author: Friend
  comment: You first post it shit.

Get all post:

Post.all # will return array with our first post

Get specify enrties:

Comment.all(author: 'Anonymous')
Post.all(title: /first/)
Post.all { |i| i.tags.length == 2 }

To get one entry use first method, which also can take matchers. You can access for fields and text by methods with same name:

post = Post.first(title: /first/)
post.file    #=> "data/first/post.md"
post.name    #=> "first"
post.title   #=> "My first post"
post.tags    #=> ["test", "first"]
post.summary #=> "It is short post summary."

You can also change and save entries:
```
post.title = 'First post'
post.save
```
And delete it (with empty dirs in it file path):
```
post.destroy
```

License

Plain Record is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3. See the LICENSE file or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html.

Author

Andrey “A.I.” Sitnik [email protected]