This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by john hume. Original Post: Specifying Column Order in ActiveRecord Migrations Feed Title: El Humidor Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ElHumidor Feed Description: John D. Hume on Ruby and development with agile teams. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by john hume Latest Posts From El Humidor

ActiveRecord migrations don't allow you to control column order when adding or changing columns. You can always just

execute "ALTER TABLE ..." # but it's ugly and hard to remember the details.

If you're willing to give up vendor neutrality, you can have the feature in pretty-Ruby-migration syntax with a small effort. Here's an implementation for MySQL that adds options :first and :after to add_column and change_column.

ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::MysqlAdapter.class_eval do
  def add_column_options!(sql, options)
    super
    if options[:after]
      sql << " AFTER #{quote_column_name(options[:after])}"
    elsif options[:first]
      sql << " FIRST"
    end
  end
end

(It's also available in this gist if you'd like to suggest a cleaner way.)

With that in place,

a.add_column :foos, :bar, :string, :after => :baz

ALTER TABLE `foos` ADD `bar` varchar(255) AFTER `baz`

a.add_column :foos, :bar, :string, :first => true

ALTER TABLE `foos` ADD `bar` varchar(255) FIRST

Love that Ruby!

Now this is a monkey-patch, but as monkey-patches go it's pretty innocuous. Rather than redefining a method that's already implemented in MysqlAdapter (and as with many monkey-patches copy-pasting the existing implementation so we can modify it), we're defining a new override of a method (albeit undocumented) inherited from the SchemaStatements module (via AbstractAdapter). If you wanted to, you could subclass MysqlAdapter and then configure Rails to use your own adapter, but I suspect that would be more expensive to own than just adding this method to MysqlAdapter. (Beware: there are many useful Rails-provided rake tasks that look at your adapter string to decide whether to be useful or to spit in your face.)