With Adventure, users can create an account and keep a log of their hiking trails. I had fun doing this project, and spend less time than with the CLI data gem project, Wanderer!! I definetely feel more confident in coding. I’ll share with you a little bit of the steps that I followed to build this.
1. Idea and Setup
I love hiking and I like to keep a log of hiking trails, so I decided to build an app that can help to keep track of hiking adventures. Before setting up the structure, I made an outline and a sketch of the end product. I used the Corneal gem (it’s awesome!!) to generate the project structure.
2. MVC: a separation of concerns
The Model-Views-Controller is a popular, and organized way to build frameworks for web applications. The cool thing about this, is that each of the groups will perform specific tasks, and interact with each other in a different way!
Model: Where the data will be saved and/or manipulated. For my project, I decided to build two models: User (a user has_many trails) and Trails(belongs_to a user).
Views: This is where the user is going to interact with the app, is the face of it, the ‘front-end’! I used bootstrap references to make it look more appealing!
Controller: The controllers will work with the models and the views, it receives data from the browser to the app, and from the app to the browser. I created three controllers: Application Controller, Users Controller, and Trails Controller. The first one handles helper functions and anything related to the homepage. The Users Controller is in charge the /login, /register, and /logout requests, and the Trails Controller works with Create Read Update Destroy(CRUD) of the app.
3. Testing the app
This was the fun part! Making sure that everything was working perfectly . At first, I had a little trouble with the validation. The problem was that I was getting duplicates of usernames, but I fixed when I remember that I didn’t add the uniqueness: true in my User model! Ooops!!
Overall, it was a good project with no major issues. It took me about three days to do the structure, coding, and styling.
Interested in taking a look? Find my code here