Agile Tortoise » Ruby on Rails

TAKScopes update

greg — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:32:44 +0000

Just rolled out an update to TAKScopes, a Rails site I built for Rice University.

The site now allows for automatic guest login to view sample of the resources available, so you can browse a little more of the site without a paid account. You still can’t see the admin interfaces, which is probably the neatest aspect from a development point of view, but it’s still cool that you can see some of the content they are pushing out. The site is getting a lot of users now, especially via ISDs all through the Houston area.

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Tech refresh for the company site

greg — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:46:27 +0000

With time that would probably have been better invested in actually improving the content of the site, I instead re-deployed my Agile Tortoise company website, in a far more buzzword compliant fashion. That’s right, rather than running on Rails 1.1.6, behind FastCGI on Apache 1.3 on a shared host with code in Subversion and deployment courtesy of Capistrano 1.4.1 — It’s now under Git, updated to Rails 2.0.2, deployed with Capistrano 2.3 to a Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) VPS running Apache 2 with mod_rails.

So, ladies and gents, I’m serving up my stale content with style! And, well, I’ve learned quite a bit in the process. Git really rocks, too. I can actually do functional and complex branching and merging it in, which I never mastered in Subversion.

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Chronic “smart” date update

greg — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:25:46 +0000

b.logi.cx posted an elegant and more complete solution to incorporating Chronic date fields in your ActiveRecord models. my version was certainly hack-ish.

I started on a simple helper plugin to use for AJAX previews of chronic’s parsing. Hopefully I’ll have something release on that before too long.

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Rails and Chronic, easy ’smart’ date fields

greg — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:24:20 +0000

There are quite a few Ruby on Rails plugins to give you nice Calendar drop downs for date selection...but, I'm much more partial to the style of fuzzy date entry you see in a lot of apps now, allowing you to enter common strings and have the app figure out the date -- ie, "next friday", "tomorrow", etc. With a pointer from Mike yesterday to the excellent Chronic gem, I was on my way.

Chronic does all the hard work, just install it...

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CODE:

gem install chronic

Then, in your views, use a text_field for your date...

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RUBY:

<% form_for :model do |f| %>
<% f.text_field :date_attr_name %>
<% end %>

In your model, you'll want to then use Chronic to parse the pre-cast value of the date attribute using the _before_type_cast methods...

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RUBY:

require 'chronic'
class MyModel
def before_save
self.date_attr_name = Chronic.parse(self.date_attr_name_before_type_cast) if self.date_attr_name_before_type_cast
end
end

I expect I'm going to find that I need to tweak this a little -- and I'm pretty sure I'll want to write a helper that will give the user a AJAX preview of the parsed date before the submit the form, but, it definitely beats the lousy Rails built-in date_select method.

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TextMate syntax coloring and Rails 2.0

greg — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:08:57 +0000

Now that the Ruby on Rails 2.0 Preview Release is out, I'm playing around with it. First thing I noticed, while minor, is that TextMate's syntax coloring for "HTML (Rails)" doesn't recognize the new view naming scheme. "rhtml" is now replaced by "html.erb" as the file extension.

It's a simple fix, however. Just open up the Bundle Editor, go to the "Rails" bundle, then the "HTML (Rails)" language definition, and add 'erb' to the filetypes array on the second line. Like:

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JavaScript:

{ scopeName = 'text.html.ruby';
fileTypes = ( 'rhtml', 'erb' );
...

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Haml

greg — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 01:55:54 +0000

Haml looks like a nice alternative to ERb for Rails template coding. I get tired of writing out ERb, but don't quite love Markaby either.

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Lone Star RubyConf

greg — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:53:10 +0000

I just registered for Lone Star RubyConf in September. Not quite the spectacular that RailsConf was, but I bet it will be a good focused 2 days of learning and networking. Plus, I can crash at Sean's.

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RailsBrain

greg — Fri, 25 May 2007 17:56:45 +0000

Aaaaah, a kinder, gentler way to browse the Rails API docs.

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TAKScopes

greg — Wed, 16 May 2007 11:54:56 +0000

Though a few details are still being worked out, the latest Ruby on Rails project I've been working on has been launched. Called TAKScopes, the site is a teaching resource site for primary level educators in Texas -- created by the Science Science and Technology Department at Rice University.

Unfortunately, from a personal point of view, the interesting parts for me to show off are all behind logins. The site has a complete custom CMS that allows the Rice staff to create/edit/manage all their content.

It's been a fun project, not the least of which because it's been the first one I've gotten to work on with my good friend Jamie Pritchett, who did the design and Flash work.

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Rails: flatten your content model with single-table inheritance and alias_attribute

greg — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:34:43 +0000

I'm currently working on a Ruby on Rails app with a very deep content model. There are many different "same-but-different" types of content to be managed. The "same" parts are roughly similar structure, like simple list items. The "different" parts are usually more meta-data oriented, such as different field labels.

I didn't want to end up with dozens of tables in the db for all these types. I also liked the idea of being able to easily search across them content types, so a relatively flat db structure would facilitate that.

My solution? Create a single table with some generic content holding fields something like the following:

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RUBY:

#migration
class CreateListItems
def self.up
create_table :list_items do |t|
t.column wner_id, :integer
t.column :type, :string
t.column :text, :text
t.column :text2, :text
end
end
def self.down
drop_table :list_items
end
end
# model
class ListItem
validates_presence_of :text
end

Now, for the various content types, use single-table inheritance to let all the models track back to the same table (the "type" field above is necessary for this to work). Also, to make the attributes match your content types, use an alias_attribute call to map the attribute names to the generic ones in the parent table. Such as:

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RUBY:

class Question
alias_attribute :question, :text
alias_attribute :answer, :text2
end

Now you'll be able interact with the Question instances naturally (q.question=, q.answer=), and any other content types you derive from ListItem.

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Rails: model == file

greg — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:10:01 +0000

If you're thinking about saving yourself a few files by placing a couple of model classes in the same file in your Rails app, think again. It seems that Rails load structure (at least in recent versions) will puke on that setup.

I was using Single Table Inheritance, and it seems a good idea -- instead I spent a hour troubleshooting an "uninitialized constant" error. Once I split the classes into their own model files I was fine.

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Rails: content_tag block fix

greg — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 03:44:50 +0000

Currently (as of 1.2.2), Ruby on Rails useful content_tag method fails if you try to pass a block to it in code. The following syntax works in a view template:

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RUBY:

<% content_for('div') do %>
this is the div content</b>.

<% end %>

But, if you try to do the equivalent in ruby code (like in a helper), such as the below, it tanks:

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RUBY:

content_for('div') do

'this is the <b>div content</b>'

end

While I'm far from an expert on Ruby details, I did a little re-write of the method. If you drop the following in your application_helper (or other place of your choice) you'll get a fully functional version:

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RUBY:

def content_tag(name, content_or_options_with_block = nil, options = nil, &block)

if block_given?

options = content_or_options_with_block if content_or_options_with_block.is_a?(Hash)

content = block.call

else

content = content_or_options_with_block

end

content_tag_string(name, content, options)

end

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Dallas.rb, now with Dave Thomas!

greg — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:00:55 +0000

The March Dallas.rb meeting will feature the Dave Thomas speaking on Metaprogramming in Ruby. Dave literally wrote the book on Ruby, and also Rails. He's also an excellent speaker.

The Dallas.rb crew has worked out special digs for this meeting, with refreshments, etc, so if you're in the DFW area and have the slightess interest in programming, you would probably find this a worthwhile evening...so come on down.

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Django vs. Rails

greg — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 03:43:40 +0000

I posted some comments RE: Django over at Jim's blog. I was planning to post some comments here, but the timing of his post prompted me.

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New Rails project

greg — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:28:28 +0000

Well, after using it for personal applications, skunk works projects that I haven't had time to actually launch, and my consulting site -- I just got the go ahead on my first professional Ruby on Rails project!

I'm really excited about it because it's also a first co-venture with Jamie, a good friend and awesome designer. More details will emerge in the coming months.

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Castle project

greg — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 13:30:32 +0000

Since I seem to stuck in .NET land a lot these days, I think I'll be looking at the Castle project a bit more closely. It has implementations for .NET that mimic the MVC and ActiveRecord setup in Rails.

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Adam Keys at RubyConf

greg — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:14:10 +0000

Dallas Ruby Brigade founder, Adam Keys, at RubyConf.

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Unobtrusive Javascript for Ruby On Rails

greg — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:14:29 +0000

UJS Rails Plugin looks like very cool stuff. I'll have to get back to this one.

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Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

greg — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:00:35 +0000

DHH's comments on Joel Spolsky's latest are pretty dern funny.

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Set base path for Rails app

greg — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 01:56:05 +0000

After a bit of searching, I finally figured out how to force Rails to use a particular base path when generating url via any of the various methods that pass through "url_for." Add the following line to your environment.rb file:

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/[basepath]"

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