Recent notes

Useful for mocking out IO methods like #gets and #puts

This class is helpful when testing certain classes of software libraries that are dependent on console input and output, similar to some testing uses of Java’s StringBuffer

output is buffered and will not appear until flush

Output is buffered on most operating systems. To override this behavior, force the stdout or other io to sync

STDOUT.sync = true

The method is still there..

It is included through ActiveModel.

see ActiveModel::Translation

Use ModelClass.model_name.human

eg. Person.model_name.human will return the i18n name for the model.

see for more info: ActiveModel::Translation

Be Advised

Also may convert original string into Jamaican.

e.g.

"green moon".squeeze  #=> "gren mon"

Preserve order of elements within fields_for

I had the @colleagues collection prepared that I wanted to be rendered within fields_for block. However it was searchlogic object with filtering/sorting applied, and the sort order was not preserved in resultant view.

<%= f.fields_for :evaluators, @colleagues do |builder| %>
<%= render "colleague", :f => builder %>
<% end %>  

Solution to this problem was typecasting this collection to array

<%= f.fields_for :evaluators, @colleagues.to_a do |builder| %>
<%= render "colleague", :f => builder %>
<% end %>  

This can be useful for conditional validation

http://rubyquicktips.tumblr.com/post/411400798/conditional-validation-using-with-options-to-improve

Custom validator with i18n support

Here is modified EmailValidator from the example above:

class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    record.errors.add(attribute, options[:message] || :email) unless
      value =~ /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\z/i
  end
end

And locale:

en:
  activerecord:
    errors:
      messages:
        email: "is not an email"

Bind the named method to the receiver

Binds the named method to the receiver, returning a Method object with access to the internals of the receiver, such as self and instance variables.

Anchor option

It’s not documented, but :anchor is an option.

polymorphic_path(commentable, :anchor => 'comments')

will return:

/article/1#comments

Mistake in example for Rails 3

This code doesn’t work:

activemodel:
  attribute:
    post:
      cost: "Total cost"

Everything is OK with this one:

activerecord:
  attributes:
    post:
      cost: "Total cost"

Nice german translation independet of structure of a sentence

Eine pragmatische Lösung für das Übersetzungsproblem der Rails Methode distance_of_time_in_words(). Im Deutschen wird je nach Satzbau eine andere Ausgabe benötigt.

Vor mehr als 5 Monaten“/”Vor etwa einem Jahr“ — statt wie im Original ”Dauer: mehr als 5 Monate“/”Dauer: etwa 1 Jahr

http://gist.github.com/598965

Or maybe...

or maybe

add_index :user_follows , :user
add_index :user_follows , :followed_user

About the options argument

The options are not documented, but of course you can use the same options than submit_tag.

Note that all non-documented options are simply passed to the input tag. Amongst other things, this allows you to change the default name attribute (commit):

form.submit 'Cancel', :name => 'cancel'

That’s very handy in forms with multiple submit buttons, this way the controller can easily check in the params which action was submitted.

using joins, group, having

Code example

named_scope :red, :joins =>   [:color_lis => :color], :group => "color.id", :having => ["color.xx IS NULL"]

No Layout (fixed typo)

@wiseleyb: Seems to be a typo, should be:

render_to_string(:action => "users/profile", :layout => false)

Documentation of I18N

lives f.ex. here: http://rdoc.info/github/svenfuchs/i18n/master/I18n

Re: Doesn't work? Don't think it ever has.

Instead of

create_table :user_follows, :force => true do |t|
  t.references :user
  t.references :followed_user
  t.timestamps
  t.index :user
  t.index :followed_user
end

Try

create_table :user_follows, :force => true do |t|
  t.references :user
  t.references :followed_user
  t.timestamps
end

index :user_follows , :user
index :user_follows , :followed_user

It looks like the provided examples are incorrect…

No concurrency

If you want to handle concurrency, this doesn’t work:

a = Article.first
b = Article.first
a.increment!(:view_count)
b.increment!(:view_count)
a.reload.view_count # -> 1
b.reload.view_count # -> 1

Instead, use SQL:

def increment_with_sql!(attribute, by = 1)
  raise ArgumentError("Invalid attribute: #{attribute}") unless attribute_names.include?(attribute.to_s)
  original_value_sql = "CASE WHEN `#{attribute}` IS NULL THEN 0 ELSE `#{attribute}` END"
  self.class.update_all("`#{attribute}` = #{original_value_sql} + #{by.to_i}", "id = #{id}")
  reload
end

bad idea.

Just a note, ypetya’s idea of using a before filter to set the primary key wont scale. transactions will eventually step on each other and probably end up with duplicate key ids, unless you have some other method to ensure uniqueness.

You’d be better off using mysql to generate the default integer primary key and have a secondary string “key” field.

Doesn't work? Don't think it ever has.

This doesn’t work for me. I do something like:

create_table :user_follows, :force => true do |t|
  t.references :user
  t.references :followed_user
  t.timestamps
  t.index :user
  t.index :followed_user
end

and I get:

rake aborted!
An error has occurred, all later migrations canceled:

undefined method `index' for #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0x106c02220>

add_index has the same effect.

takes ActiveRecord object as an arg as well

One undocumented feature, you can do this:

person = Person.first
Person.exists?(person)
# => returns true

This came in handy for me when I needed to see if something belonged to a particular scope.

scope = "created_rails"
person = Person.find_by_name "dhh"
Person.send(scope).exists?(person)
# => returns true

Obviously this relies on you having a named_scope in your Person model called “created_rails”.

To illustrate Date class let's calculate days between dates

Code example

date_from = Date.new(2010, 9, 11)
#<Date: 4910901/2,0,2299161>
date_till = Date.new(2010, 11, 12)
#<Date: 4911025/2,0,2299161>
rational_offset = (date_till - date_from)
#Rational62, 1
rational_offset.to_i
#62

Don't forget about as

:as is a good but poorly document argument to rendering a collection:

<%= render :partial => 'some_partial', :collection => an_array, :as => :better_name -%>

Which will give you each element of an_array in the partial in a local variable named better_name not some_partial.

Set hour and/or minutes

To set the hour and/or the minutes, you can use:

<%= f.datetime_select(:offer_end, :default => { :hour => 23, :minute => 59 }) %>

Undocumented :inverse_of option

Support for the :inverse_of option was backported to 2.3.6+.

Here’s the description from the original commit: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/ccea98389abbf150b886c9f964b1def47f00f237

You can now add an :inverse_of option to has_one, has_many and belongs_to associations. This is best described with an example:

class Man < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :face, :inverse_of => :man
end

class Face < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :man, :inverse_of => :face
end

m = Man.first
f = m.face

Without :inverse_of m and f.man would be different instances of the same object (f.man being pulled from the database again). With these new :inverse_of options m and f.man are the same in memory instance.

Currently :inverse_of supports has_one and has_many (but not the :through variants) associations. It also supplies inverse support for belongs_to associations where the inverse is a has_one and it’s not a polymorphic.

Undocumented :inverse_of option

Support for the :inverse_of option was backported to 2.3.6+.

Here’s the description from the original commit: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/ccea98389abbf150b886c9f964b1def47f00f237

You can now add an :inverse_of option to has_one, has_many and belongs_to associations. This is best described with an example:

class Man < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :face, :inverse_of => :man
end

class Face < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :man, :inverse_of => :face
end

m = Man.first
f = m.face

Without :inverse_of m and f.man would be different instances of the same object (f.man being pulled from the database again). With these new :inverse_of options m and f.man are the same in memory instance.

Currently :inverse_of supports has_one and has_many (but not the :through variants) associations. It also supplies inverse support for belongs_to associations where the inverse is a has_one and it’s not a polymorphic.

Undocumented :inverse_of option

Support for the :inverse_of option was backported to 2.3.6+.

Here’s the description from the original commit: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/ccea98389abbf150b886c9f964b1def47f00f237

You can now add an :inverse_of option to has_one, has_many and belongs_to associations. This is best described with an example:

class Man < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :face, :inverse_of => :man
end

class Face < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :man, :inverse_of => :face
end

m = Man.first
f = m.face

Without :inverse_of m and f.man would be different instances of the same object (f.man being pulled from the database again). With these new :inverse_of options m and f.man are the same in memory instance.

Currently :inverse_of supports has_one and has_many (but not the :through variants) associations. It also supplies inverse support for belongs_to associations where the inverse is a has_one and it’s not a polymorphic.

Validating presence of parent in child

When creating a parent and its children using nested attributes, you can use the :inverse_of option on the association to correctly set the parent back references:

class Parent < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :children, :inverse_of => :parent
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :children
end

class Child < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent
  validates_presence_of :parent
end

Deprecated

Instead of using:

session.delete

Now use:

reset_session