Ruby-on-Rails

I used to be a strong adherent to tracking edge rails. Up until the release of rails 2.3 I let most of my frequently updated projects track edge with a vendored copy of rails, and it rarely caused me any trouble. When 2.3 hit I rethought all that. With Rails 3 development ramping up I suspected there’d be significant disruption taking place; even with comprehensive test suits I didn’t want the headaches of keeping track of that, and I didn’t want to spoil the pleasant surprises I expected when Rails 3 landed. ...

Somewhere between Ruby on Rails versions 2.3.0 (RC1) and 2.3.2 (final) a change was made to the arguments required for one of the methods the theme_support plugin requires. I must confess I hadn’t spotted it, but github user knapo kindly sent me a message with a patch. That patch is now applied in the main repository, as are a few tweaks to the ActionMailer integration to better handle multipart emails. You can get the new version from github. ...

In my ongoing efforts to bring my fork of theme_support in line with Rails 2.3 I’ve covered the core views and email, but when I left off earlier today layouts still weren’t working. The key problem with overriding layouts is that the process of identifying them relies on some class methods on ActionController::Base (provided in the ActionController::Layout module). Roughly put we have: ActionController::Base#render calls ActionController::Base#pick_layout ActionController::Base#pick_layout checks to see if there’s a specific layout requested and calls ActionController::Base#active_layout ActionController::Base#active_layout checks whether there’s a candidate layout for this controller or action and makes sure the layout exists by calling ActionController::Base.find_layout ActionController::Base.find_layout (class method) is called which checks the view_paths to find the appropriate layout in there The issue is that as a class method ActionController::Base.active_layout has no knowledge of the specific controller instance, or the request object it contains, and so it can’t access our logic to determine the current theme. ...

Stage 2 of fixing up theme_support for Rails 2.3 was making sure that ActionMailer picked up themed templates (for stage 1 information see here). That’s something I’d not quite cracked in the 2.2 version, so starting afresh with 2.3 forced me to spend the time to look through the full render path and figure out what was going on. ActionMailer is a little more complicated than ActionView in that there are multiple routes of entry (ways of sending emails) and each email can have multiple templates associated with it to allow for multipart email. But at the core of it all is the ActionMailer::Base#create! method. This executes the specific method that populates the mailer variables (ie. the code you actually write in your mailers) and then uses Dir.glob to look for appropriate templates for this email: ...

A couple of months back, I realised that two of my projects ( Generous and Catapult) could do with the help of the theme_support Rails plugin. Discovering that it didn’t play nicely with Rails 2.1, I created a fork on github and hacked at the _pick_template method to get it to do what I wanted. It turned out a few people were interested in having the plugin work with Rails 2.1, some of whom used more of the plugin’s featured than I need, and a few further forks emerged. I’ve been meaning to work through them and merge together the best bits, but the impending release of Rails 2.3 stopped me in my tracks. ...

I like to always have at least one project on the go that works as a testbed for a variety of new Rails techniques, tools and releases. For a long time that project was Grand Rapids WiFi, a site that lapsed into some neglect after I moved (a long way) away from the town it focussed on, but which I still officially maintain. It was where I first tried Rails 1.1 and 1.2, where I got to grips with various geo tools, and where I first generated RDF and Atom from a Rails app. ...

Thoughtbot have released a suite of plugins over the past few months that are enlivening the fields of Ruby on Rails file attachments ( paperclip) and authentication ( clearance), long dominated by Rick Olson’s attachment_fu and restful_authentication. You can see some previous posts about attachment_fu here and here. I’ve been playing with paperclip on a couple of projects, including one which was previously using attachment_fu. That necessitated some work migrating the previous attachments. Opinions are divided on whether data should be transformed in migrations or in separate libraries, and I’d rather remain agnostic on that, but I whipped together some code that can be used either in migrations or an external library to make the transfer. ...

About eighteen months ago I compiled a series of reviews of Ruby on Rails plugins concerned with geography. I put together a comparison chart and posted it on this blog. It subsequently found a new home on a wiki, but lately that wiki has rarely been accessible so I decided it was time to move it all back into this site. You can now find the comparison chart at: /process/resources/rails-geo-plugins/ A few updates have been lost along the way as they were solely made on the wiki, but hopefully it’s still of use. Since I published the original reviews and chart my attention has wandered a little from the geo plugin scene, so please do flag up any new plugins, changes in features or fixes that I may have missed. I’m going to be trying to check through all the existing listings to update them but that may take a while, so comments here may well encourage me to focus more quickly. ...

A couple of years ago I wrote and released a Ruby on Rails plugin called loads_from_amazon. It made it relatively simple to populate a model with data based on an amazon search, and was very helpful in the project I was then working on. That project ended and I’ve not had time to maintain the plugin since. It was based on a clunky amazon ECS library and I kept meaning to rewrite it to sit on something more up to date, like amazon-ecs, but the time never materialised. ...

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. ...