Notes posted by steven_chanin

Be careful about ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json

If you have set ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = true, then when you do .to_json on an object, the output will begin with the class name rather than just a hash of attributes.

from the rails docs

konata = User.find(1)
ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = true
konata.to_json
=> { "user": {"id": 1, "name": "Konata Izumi", "age": 16,
          "created_at": "2006/08/01", "awesome": true} }

if you try to pass this output as the argument to from_json, things will blow up.

User.new.from_json(konata.to_json[“user”]) will just pass in the attribute hash and will work.

Also, note that if you’ve use attr_accessible to limit mass assignment, you’ll have problems if you try pass in attributes that are not allowed to be mass assigned.

Clearing out previous values from content_for

By default, content_for :thing appends whatever you put in your block to the previous value of :thing. In some cases, you’d like to clear out :thing rather than append to it.

I just posted a way to do this on my blog: http://stevechanin.blogspot.com/2009/11/clearing-out-content-in-contentfor.html

I add a new method set_content_for that works just like content_for, but clears out :thing first. It doesn’t touch how content_for works, so it shouldn’t cause any problems anywhere else in your app.