Seed data in Rails 2.3.4

Very nice addition to Rails as part of the security updates in 2.3.4- an easy way to load seed data.

Added db/seeds.rb as a default file for storing seed data for the database. Can 
be loaded with rake db:seed (or created alongside the db with db:setup). (This 
is also known as the "Stop Putting Gawd Damn Seed Data In Your Migrations" 
feature)

I like this on several accounts, not least of which is it invalidates my previous post on the subject.

In the meantime, there are several plugin based approaches to making this work, for example seed-fu.

Default route...

One of the things that has been bothering me in Rails since everything switched to resources is how we lost the easy way any public method in the controller became an accessible URL without having to write a rule for it. For example, in a person controller, I could define a search method like this:

def search     
results = Person.seach(params[:q])
end

And it would be accessible, just like that. http://myapp/people/search?q=matt
I even wrote a simple router in Java to do the same thing, because it just makes it so easy to navigate the application code.

The poor design of map.resources messes this up. By adding the route pattern :controller/:id it starts with the default assumption that the search?q=matt part of my URL is an ID. Is it so hard to put an action name in there? In any case,

map.connect ':controller/:action'

goes above all of the map.resources calls in my app. You might want to put it in your application too.