I recently incorporated db-triggers with a Rails app to maintain some counts that were otherwise fairly expensive to retrieve. Rails wasn’t super-pumped about the idea (what with the “keep all the logic in the app” approach and all), but sometimes… you know… you know better than your framework. Some things I was aiming for: Set them [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘rails’
November 25, 2009
Friend’s Price
A friend was asking the other day about getting a little site up and running for his small business. Seems like the scope is going to be quite small (famous last words) and there are a few things I’ve been meaning to checkout lately, so I think I’m going to give it a stab. Night [...]
October 27, 2008
Ruby String Concatenation
Ran in to a bug tonight. See it? def display_value display_value = notes.blank? ? “untitled” : notes display_value << ” (#{ shortcut })” unless shortcut.blank? display_value end Need a hint? The symptom was the +notes+ field being unexpectedly changed. +display_value+ is pointed at +notes+. “<<” then goes ahead and changes that value (which both attributes [...]
July 7, 2008
Rails Upgrade Bumps
After skimming the “What’s New” posts for several Rails versions without finding anything worth jumping at, it was time to upgrade. While JSON enhancements (fixes) are the driving reason for the move, there certainly are a few “nice to haves” that I’ve been looking forward to checking out. Partial Updates Unfortunately, one of the [...]
January 30, 2008
Is an association already loaded?
If you can’t tell… I like posting little “cheatsheet” items here. So, here’s another one that I’ve bumped into again recently after not needing it for a while. You want to know how many Items are currently in the Store and you’ve got this in your Store definition: has_many :items If the Items for this [...]
November 14, 2007
Nice(r) Hash treatment for URLs
Isn’t it nice how Rails lets you add form elements using the convention: store[manager] = Bob Smith store[location][state] = Wisconsin store[location][zip] = 53590 And easily process them on the server side with something like: Store.new(params[:store]) So, why does this: link_to “Store”, :controller => :store, :action => :show, :store => { :manager => “Bob Smith”, :location [...]
February 26, 2007
Links for blackberry’s
A user recently reported an issue with our emails. The issue being that our links weren’t properly coming through on his Blackberry unit, while links from others looked fine. After a bit of digging the issue ended up being that: <a href=”http://seekingalpha.com”>SA</a> displayed like this (which is desired on the unit): SA <http://seekingalpha.com> While this: [...]
December 6, 2006
Receiving Email with ActionMailer
This really was a snap. A nice and simple testing recipe (#68) demonstrates how to read in an email from a fixture in just a few lines and pass them to your processing method (MailReceiver.receive in this case). def read_fixture(action) IO.readlines(“#{FIXTURES_PATH}/mail_receiver/#{action}”) end def test_something email = read_fixture(“junk_mail”).join MailReceiver.receive(email) # assertions end And then a few [...]
October 2, 2006
Be careful with assert_not_equal
As I discovered today, assert_not_equal has a pretty big problem: it does exactly what you ask it to do. I just need to make sure that a user has at least one record: assert_not_equal 0, UserPreference.find_by_user_id(user_id) As you may have just caught: that is always going to pass. Not a tough mistake when you’re motoring [...]
September 21, 2006
Send an image
You’d think it would be easy to send an image to a client with a framework as wonderful as Rails. After doing quite a bit of searching for the simple way, I really didn’t turn up too much. Finally, I decided I would just open the file and write it out the old fashioned way: [...]
