For those of you who ever have to do Rails work with an older database that was not created according to RoR naming specs and to which other things have been coded such that you can't just rename everything, here's something I found out the hard way. I created my model and used set_table_name to point to the correct table in the DB. I could do a :scaffold in the controller and everything worked fine. However, if I tried to generate the scaffolding so I could modify it, I'd get the dreaded "Before updating scaffolding from new DB schema, try creating a table for your model" error. I was befuddled why a scaffolding that was working would give such an error on generate.

After much googling, I found out that the scaffold generator ignores your existing model, and only has the capacity to create from the tablename it expects based on your model and controller names. To get around this, I renamed the table to what Rails expected, generated the scaffold, named the table back to the original and then used the set_table_name to point to the original table name. I think it's kind of a pain this way, but the workaround is to temporarily make the name what RoR wants just long enough for the generation, and then set it back. It beats copying the scaffolding from a different class and changing everything by hand, which is what I did the last time this came up.