Posts tagged ActiveRecord

Cucumber, wordpress and database_cleaner

Aug 7th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

I’m up to my usual using-ruby-tools-to-test-other-environments tricks, using cucumber and my wordpress activerecord classes to do acceptance testing against a highly-customised wordpress install.

I’m hoping to write a bit more about that soon, once I’ve put it through its paces a little more and cleaned up some of the code, but I wanted to quickly mention one of the key pain-points and an extremely handy solution.

One of the things I enjoy most about testing in rails is the handy tasks to prepare a blank database and the transactions that ensure the database is returned to that state after each test. Obviously that wasn’t going to work cleanly with wordpress since it doesn’t use ActiveRecord, but Matt kindly pointed me in the direction of Ben Mabey’s database_cleaner gem.

With that installed it’s as simple as adding:

require 'database_cleaner'
require 'database_cleaner/cucumber'
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[wp_options]}

to my 

features/support/env.rb

file and my database is reset on each step. Combined with a few hooks to manage the configuration and load in the schema at the appropriate point, it’s turning into quite a nice little testing environment.

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Talking to Wordpress with ActiveRecord

Jul 24th

Posted by James Stewart in Announcements

As mentioned in yesterday’s announcement I’m pulling some content across from this blog (running on wordpress) into the new Ket Lai site (a merb app). I’ve found myself doing similar things a few times lately, such as on Only Connect (on which more, soon) and so have built out a selection of ActiveRecord models to help me talk to a wordpress database from a ruby app.

At Matt’s urging (he’s been using them to move data from a legacy site), I’ve finally put those models up on github. Being a single file they arguably should have been a gist, but I’m reserving the right to reorganise them in future.

They’re far from complete in that there are lots of validations I could have added in, named scopes that would probably be handy, and loads of convenience methods that some might like, but hopefully they’ll be of use to someone and evolve over time.

(on the subject of wordpress, I’m glad to see the addition of changelogs to the plugin directory – being asked to upgrade plugins without any idea what’s changed has long been a bugbear of mine, so hopefully this will resolve some of that)

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Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links

Mar 28th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

  • Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials

    Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users

  • iPhone Coding For Web Developers

    Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph

  • Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp

    There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."

  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

    "That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more

  • russell davies: newspapers and all that

    "If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising

  • Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme

    "Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.

    Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.

    And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."

  • SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com

    Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.

  • SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |

    "Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."

  • stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

    "I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."

  • On running a panel

    A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.

  • Guardian API Maps – Home

    "This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."

  • Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer

    Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.

  • A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform

    I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in

  • Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit

    Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.

  • Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished

    "One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"

  • Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

    Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit

  • Generation Open | FactoryCity

    "Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…

  • Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

    For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.

  • scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

    A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.

  • How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

    Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably

  • Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

    A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.

  • Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

    Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)

  • Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

    Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".

  • Oauth using pecl/OAuth

    Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

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Selected Saturday Links

Mar 7th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

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Announcing image_associations

Aug 20th

Posted by James Stewart in Announcements

Discussions of multi-model forms and nested models in Rails has been revived recently, with various changes appearing in Edge Rails, plugins like attribute_fu getting a lot of attention, and the release of ActivePresenter. It looks like when the dust settles we’ll have a nice new set of ways to simplify our code.

One thing I frequently find myself doing is associating multiple images with a given model. My news story might have a banner image, and a series of other attachments, which I could specify with:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :banner_image
  has_many :story_attachments
end
 
class BannerImage < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attachment # I'm using attachment_fu
end
 
class StoryAttachment < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attachment # I'm using attachment_fu
end

(or I could use has_one in place of belongs_to there, your tastes/requirements may vary)

What quickly becomes a pain is assigning the images to the models, and having rejected fat controllers I often end up writing accessors on my models to manage that for me:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :banner_image
  has_many :story_attachments
 
  def banner_image(data)
    if valid_file?(data)
      self.banner_image = BannerImage.create(:uploaded_data => data)
    end
  end
 
  def valid_file?
    # etc.
  end
end

That quickly gets dull, so I've wrapped it up in a plugin I'm calling image_associations. With that I can write:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to_image :banner_image
  has_many_images :story_attachments
end

and get the accessors for free.

It may only be of use to me, and it's pretty crude (there's no support for deleting attachments, for example) but it's been working nicely and has DRYed up my code in a satisfying way, so I thought I'd throw it out there. You can find it over on github.

(I'm not promising to keep supporting it, but it is used in an active project so chances are bug fixes will make it in. And of course, anyone is welcome to branch the project and twist it in their own ways)

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