Migrations has been always one of the importnat features of Rails. With Rails 3.1 they got new , it no more up and down methods , there is only one method change .
if you look at any migration , there are couple of questions like “why class methods ?” , “why rails not taking care of reversing migration itself?”
this is what new approach is all about !
Aaron Patterson simplified things !
The new Change method !
<code>
class CreateProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :products do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :description
t.string :image_url
t.decimal :price
t.timestamps
end
end
end
</code>
this is default migration for Models using change method , as you can see there is only up logic . When you want to do rollback , rails will figure out how to reverse the migration from understanding your up code .
But ofcource there are few things which cannot be automatically reversed , this is becuase inforamtion required to do so is not available. e.g remove_column . In such cases rails will rais exception “ActiveRecord::IrreversibleMigration" .
In this case manually define up and down method . but then it can be just simple instance methods and not class methods .
Do take a look at the code to understand what is happening .
