Getting started with DataMapper

If you think you might need some help, there’s an active community supporting DataMapper through the mailing list and the #datamapper IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

So lets imagine we’re setting up some models for a blogging app. We’ll keep it nice and simple. The first thing to decide on is what models we want. Post is a given. So is Comment. But let’s mix it up and do Category too.

Install an Adapter

First, you will need to install an Adapter, which allows DataMapper to communicate to the Database:

Install DataMapper

If you have RubyGems installed, open a Terminal and install a few things.

gem install data_mapper

This will install the following, most commonly used DataMapper gems.

Require it in your application

require 'rubygems'
require 'data_mapper' # requires all the gems listed above

Specify your database connection

You need to make sure to do this before you use your models, i.e. before you actually start accessing the database.

  # If you want the logs displayed you have to do this before the call to setup
  DataMapper::Logger.new($stdout, :debug)

  # An in-memory Sqlite3 connection:
  DataMapper.setup(:default, 'sqlite::memory:')

  # A Sqlite3 connection to a persistent database
  DataMapper.setup(:default, 'sqlite:///path/to/project.db')

  # A MySQL connection:
  DataMapper.setup(:default, 'mysql://user:password@hostname/database')

  # A Postgres connection:
  DataMapper.setup(:default, 'postgres://user:password@hostname/database')

Note: that currently you must setup a :default repository to work with DataMapper (and to be able to use additional differently named repositories). This might change in the future.

Define your models

The Post model is going to need to be persistent, so we’ll include DataMapper::Resource. The convention with model names is to use the singular, not plural version…but that’s just the convention, you can do whatever you want.

class Post
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id,         Serial    # An auto-increment integer key
  property :title,      String    # A varchar type string, for short strings
  property :body,       Text      # A text block, for longer string data.
  property :created_at, DateTime  # A DateTime, for any date you might like.
end

class Comment
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id,         Serial
  property :posted_by,  String
  property :email,      String
  property :url,        String
  property :body,       Text
end

class Category
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id,         Serial
  property :name,       String
end

The above example is simplified, but you can also specify more options such as constraints for your properties. DataMapper supports a lot of different property types natively, and more through dm-types.

An important thing to note is that every model must have a key in order to be valid. If a model has no key, there’s no way to identify a resource and thus no way to update its persistent state within the backend datastore. DataMapper will raise a DataMapper::IncompleteModelError when trying to auto_migrate! a model that has no key declared.

Have a look at property to learn about the different ways of declaring keys for your models.

Associations

Ideally, these declarations should be done inside your class definition with the properties and things, but for demonstration purposes, we will just re-open the classes.

One To Many

Posts can have comments, so we’ll need to setup a simple one-to-many association between then:

class Post
  has n, :comments
end

class Comment
  belongs_to :post
end

Has and belongs to many

Categories can have many Posts and Posts can have many Categories, so we’ll need a many to many relationship commonly referred to “has and belongs to many”. We’ll setup a quick model to wrap our join table between the two so that we can record a little bit of meta-data about when the post was categorized into a category.

class Categorization
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id,         Serial
  property :created_at, DateTime

  belongs_to :category
  belongs_to :post
end

# Now we re-open our Post and Categories classes to define associations
class Post
  has n, :categorizations
  has n, :categories, :through => :categorizations
end

class Category
  has n, :categorizations
  has n, :posts,      :through => :categorizations
end

Finalize Models

After declaring all of the models, you should finalize them:

DataMapper.finalize

This checks the models for validity and initializes all properties associated with relationships. It is likely if you use a web-framework such as merb or rails, this will already be done for you. In case you do not, be sure to call it at an appropriate time.

DataMapper allows the use of natural primary keys, composite primary keys and other complexities. Because of this, when a model is declared with a belongs_to relationship the property to hold the foreign key cannot be initialized immediately. It can only be initialized when the parent model has also been declared. This is hard for DataMapper to determine, due to the dynamic nature of ruby, so it is left up to developers to determine the appropriate time.

In general, you want to call finalize before your application starts accessing the models.

Set up your database tables

Relational Databases work with pre-defined tables. To be able to create the tables in the underlying storage, you need to have dm-migrations loaded.

Note: If you’ve been following this instructions and did require 'data_mapper', you can safely skip the following require statement as it has already been done for you.

require  'dm-migrations'

Once dm-migrations is loaded, you can create the tables by issuing the following command:

DataMapper.auto_migrate!

This will issue the necessary CREATE statements (DROPing the table first, if it exists) to define each storage according to their properties. After auto_migrate! has been run, the database should be in a pristine state. All the tables will be empty and match the model definitions.

This wipes out existing data, so you could also do:

DataMapper.auto_upgrade!

This tries to make the schema match the model. It will CREATE new tables, and add columns to existing tables. It won’t change any existing columns though (say, to add a NOT NULL constraint) and it doesn’t drop any columns. Both these commands also can be used on an individual model (e.g. Post.auto_migrate!)

Create your first resource

Using DataMapper to create a resource (A resource is an instance of a model) is simple

# create makes the resource immediately
@post = Post.create(
  :title      => "My first DataMapper post",
  :body       => "A lot of text ...",
  :created_at => Time.now
)

# Or new gives you it back unsaved, for more operations
@post = Post.new(:title => ..., ...)
@post.save                           # persist the resource

Both are equivalent. The first thing to notice is we didn’t specify the auto-increment key. This is because the data-store will provide that value for us, and should make sure it’s unique, too. Also, note that while the property is a DateTime, we can pass it a Time instance, and it will convert (or typecast) the value for us, before it saves it to the data-store. Any properties which are not specified in the hash will take their default values in the data-store.