====== Tip Sheet For Beginners ======

===== Getting started =====

==== Creating an Akelos project ====

<code bash>
./akelos website_name
</code>

==== Creating controllers and models====

<code bash>
./script/generate type name
</code>
 where "type" is **controller** or **model** and "name" is your choice. You can also try 
<code bash>
./script/generate scaffold
</code>
for information on creating scaffolds

===== Conventions =====



==== Table (schema) in database ====

Plural, with underscores instead of spaces between words, like **steering_wheels**


Akelos handles creation date/time and update date/time out of the box, so there is no need to code it yourself.
Handling dates and searching through ranges might be tricky, if you use the Akelos conventions this comes for free.

By convention if you add a column named "created_at" or "updated_at" it will handle those fields for you automatically and if you name a column in a migration like "posted_at" it will set the field type and length for you, in this case, datetime. If you use "created_on" it will use just "date".

==== Model ==== 

Singular, first letter Capitalized, CamelCase for models like **SteeringWheel**

Validation of data is here.

=== Relationships between various tables ===

Model files have information in them which appears like //belongs_to// and //has_many// and reflects automatic connections made by Akelos, using fields like //author_id// in a story table

  * **[[belongs_to|belongs_to]]** - a Story model belongs_to an Author.  When a table is linked to another table with belongs_to, you can refer to fields in that table by appending  the relationship name to the class name.  E.g., if product belongs_to category, then in a view that deals with product you can get the category name with $Product->category->name.
  * **[[has_many|has_many]]** - an Author has_many Stories

Plurality matters. Be very careful -- Akelos does stuff with making this singular and plural again, so make sure you are including the appropriate number of s


==== Controller ====

Convention is to use the plural form of the model name when applicable, e.g. **stories** controller, **authors** controller

  *Says what to do and where to do it. Has logic like "if post is not valid, send error about validation"
  * Prepares variable for view from model
    * Create variable of tables using things like the find('all') command in the API

==== View ====
How things look - Akelos in html => tpl

  * Uses variables in Controller and prints them
  * Get variable from controller replacing $this-> symbol with $ ( Ex.  $this->movies in bob_controller action submit => allows submit.tpl to access something called $movies )
  * The scaffolding creates edit, show, and delete links in list views.  To replace the text 'show' with another field in the list view, do this
  <code ruby>
   <%= link_to product.name, :action => 'show', :id => product.id %>
</code>