Re: How well does Rails handle brownfield data in a greenfield application?

Conrad Taylor
2009-05-22T16:46:20Z

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Wayne Molina
<wayne.molina-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>wrote:

>
> Let me give an example:  Say I have an e-commerce storefront with data
> that''s provided by a 3rd-party vendor, instead of just a handful
of
> items that I''m selling myself (which seems to be the way most
Rails e-
> commerce sites are set up, for example Shopify).  My vendor has a list
> of about 28,000 product SKUs which they provide to me as a huge tab
> delimited flat-file containing product, manufacturer and category
> information (i.e. not relational in any way, shape or form, just a
> glorified spreadsheet), which I will need to parse several times to
> extract the fields into different tables.  This file has predefined
> IDs for the primary key for each column, that needs to be used in
> order to reference items properly (e.g. Product #12543 is made by
> Manufacturer #17835 and belongs to Category #34324, based on the
> columns "ProductID", "ManufacturerID" and
"CategoryID").  I can''t
> deviate from this structure.
>
> Would Rails have any potential issues with having its ID key
> predetermined beforehand?  In the database it can still be kept as an
> autoincrementing integer, just the ID gets assigned prior - I''m
going
> to have to write a task of some kind to parse the file out into chunks
> and then load the product data into the correct models using those
> chunks of relevant data.  If I was dealing with a database directly
> this might cause some issues, but I''m not sure about Rails itself.
>
> I want to make sure I won''t run into any pitfalls before I make an
> attempt at this.


I would recommend leaving the Rails record IDs intact and simply create
another field that represents the SKU.  This could be a non-autoincrement
field in your table but this really depends on how the vendor introduces
new products to the system.  In short, your record ID should be different
from your product ID (i.e. SKU) because this would give you a bit more
flexibility in the future in regards to change of the SKU.  For example, if
the
SKU, 12543, changed to one of the following:

CAT12543

or

ZIP12543

or


BIF12543

You get the idea.

Good luck,

-Conrad

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