How to call rails 3 model method in the console

Question

I have a method in a rails 3 model that parses XML with nokogiri. How can I call this method in the console in order to test its out.

Here is the whole class (I'm trying to call generate_list):

class Podcast < ActiveRecord::Base  validates_uniqueness_of :name  serialize :hosts  def generate_list  # fetch the top 300 podcasts from itunes itunes_top_300 = Nokogiri.HTML(open("http://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/toppodcasts/limit=300/explicit=true/xml"))  # parse the returned xml itunes_top_300.xpath('//feed/entry').map do |entry|   new_name = entry.xpath("./name").text   podcast = Podcast.find(:all, :conditions => {:name => new_name})   if podcast.nil?     podcast = Podcast.new(       :name => entry.xpath("./name").text,       :itunesurl => entry.xpath("./link/@href").text,       :category => entry.xpath("./category/@term").text,       :hosts => entry.xpath("./artist").text,       :description => entry.xpath("./summary").text,       :artwork => entry.xpath("./image[@height='170']").text           )     podcast.save   else     podcast.destroy   end end  end  end 

Edit: Wow, 1000 views. I hope this question has helped people as much as it helped me. It's amazing to me when I look back on this that, little more than a year ago, I couldn't figure out the difference between instance methods and class methods. Now I am writing complex service-oriented applications and backends in ruby, Rails, and many other languages/frameworks. Stack Overflow is the reason for this. Thank you so much to this community for empowering people to solve their problems and understand their solutions.

Answer 1

It looks like you're wanting to use this as a class method, and so you must define it like this:

def self.generate_list   ... end 

Then you can call this as Podcast.generate_list.

Answer 2

From your code, it looks like your generate_list method actually builds the Podcast and saves it?

Start up the rails console: $ rails console

And create a new Podcast, calling the method on it:

> pod = Podcast.new > pod.generate_list