Can anyone recommend me a data model visualizer that works with #Rails? Ideally I can drop my schema.rb on it and get something that turns that into showing me all of the relationships and properties. If it was similar to this screenshot of the Core Data modeler, that would be awesome.
@collin Takes some massaging but rails-erd is quite nice. I’ve found several bugs with it in the form of relationships that were misconfigured. It boots your app and looks at each model’s actual associations (and fields, which adds a lot of noise).
@caleb Yeah, there was definitely a lot of noise. I might play with it more since so many people seem to like it. My main issue was that where it placed things in the PDF clearly isn't random, but also is kind of hard for me to make sense of, and I'm not sure how I'd tell it to do differently.
@collin I find it’s best to hand it an allowlist of models and omit fields entirely. That way I can say “here’s how this subsystem works” and I commit the .dot and .png as artifacts.
@collin I’ll happily add another +1 to the recommendations for rails-erd. It proved repeatedly useful when I took over a legacy codebase with a subpar data model. And I plan to use it in future projects.
@collin rails-erd gem. It's pretty good, and customizable, but it can sometimes generate very busy diagrams. It uses the schema as well as the associations defined in the model. https://github.com/voormedia/rails-erd
@Paul this looks really good. I’m going to give it a shot. I spent a good part of the day making my brain hurt trying to keep how everything is connected in my head 😂
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