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 ‘Ruby’
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 [...]
March 9, 2009
Baseball Draft
Ah yes, it’s that wonderful time of year again: fantasy baseball time. Anyone who plays fantasy sports can tell you that other than getting a check for winning your league (something I would know nothing about), the best part of the season is the draft. My fantasy draft preparation always involves the creation of a [...]
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 [...]
December 2, 2007
Leading zeroes on Time.strftime
Not sure why this isn’t in the Ruby documentation (at least where I normally check) but the common annoyance of leading zeros on Time.strftime can be avoided simply by using “%l”. It does come with another inconvenience though: you get a leading space instead of a leading zero…
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 [...]
