How do you generate the form for an existing model in Rails?

Question

What is the command to generate a single file (_form.html.erb) for an existing model?

Working in Rails 3.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This may sound silly, but hear me out... I've done things like this a few times myself when I wanted to start clean. Following is a script that will read your schema and produce the necessary generate commands to reproduce it:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_support/core_ext'
schema = File.read('db/schema.rb')
schema.scan(/create_table "(\w+)",.*?\n(.*?)\n  end/m).each do |name, ddl|
  puts "rails generate scaffold #{name.classify} " +
    ddl.scan(/t\.(\w+)\s+"(\w+)"/).
    reject {|type,name| %w(created_at updated_at).include? name}.
    map {|type,name| "#{name}:#{type}"}.join(' ')
end

If you run this, you will get a series of commands. In a new directory, create a new rails application, and then run these commands (simply copying and pasting them will do). Grab the files you want. Delete the directory when you are done.