• Mar 20, 2008

  Living on the edge (of Rails) #12

  This week’s report covers changes from 10 Mar 2008 to 16 Mar 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

  Custom JavaScript and stylesheet symbols

  Remember how you can do something like:

  javascript_include_tag :defaults

  and Rails would load all the Prototype JavaScript files and your application.js?

  You can now register your own custom expansion symbol too:

  # In a Rails initializer.
  ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper.register_javascript_expansion :yui => ['yahoo', 'autocomplete', 'calendar']
  
  # In your view.
  javascript_include_tag :yui

  would result in:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/yahoo.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/autocomplete.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/calendar.js"></script>

  You can do the same with the stylesheet_link_tag by registering a custom expansion symbol via register_stylesheet_expansion.

  This is useful for anyone but in particular plugin developers who have a multiple asset files would appreciate being able to tell users to include JavaScript or stylesheets using a single symbol.

  Warning: This patch currently breaks the default symbols like :all (check out the ticket for more info).

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9016

  Sexy default timestamps in migrations

  Remember how you can say timestamps in a migration and Rails will create the 'created_at' and 'updated_at' columns for you? You can now also do add_timestamps :table_name and remove_timestamps :table_name in your migrations if you decide to add these columns later to a table:

  def self.up
    add_timestamps :posts
  end
  
  def self.down
    remove_timestamps :posts
  end

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9014

  ActiveRecord::Base#find(:last)

  Just like Comment.find(:first), you can now do something like Comment.find(:last). There's some controversy over whether this is bloat, but DHH makes a good case for it with this example:

  class Person
    has_many :comments, :order => 'created_at'
  end
  
  @some_person.comments.find(:last) # => Returns the most recent comment.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9012

  Database rake tasks fixes

  rake db:create used to ignore the 'charset' and 'collation' options in your database.yml configuration file. This has been fixed so that your created databases now respect those options.

  rake db:drop and rake db:migrate:reset also no longer crash with an unhelpful exception if the database has already been dropped, and instead shows a proper error message.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9004

  Rails' logger now creates the log directory if it doesn't exist

  This is a blessing to those of us who use version control systems that don't support empty directories (like Git). Rails' default logger (the BufferedLogger), now creates a log/ directory if it doesn't already exist. This should save you the step of creating/symlinking a log/ directory (or symlinking) on deploy.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9013

  String#squish is faster

  A faster implementation of the String#squish (and String#squish!) core extension has been committed.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9015

  The #excerpt TextHelper no longer includes 1 character too many

  Turns out that the #excerpt helper method was consistently including an extra character. This has been fixed.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/9030

  As usual, let me know of any inaccuracies or any suggestions you may have in the comments!

• Mar 15, 2008

  UTF8 encoding with Ruby Sequel (and MySQL)

  Just a quick note to self. If you need to store Unicode and are using Sequel, make sure you:

  • Create the database with a default charset of UTF8: CREATE DATABASE my_db DEFAULT CHARSET utf8;. I think then any tables you create uses the default charset of utf8 unless otherwise specified.
  • Pass an :encoding option to Sequel's MySQL adapter:

    DB = Sequel.mysql 'my_db', :user => 'root', :password => '', :host => 'localhost', :encoding => 'utf8'

  The Sequel documentation and wiki were quite unhelpful but reading code (see the connect method definition) always helps!

• Mar 12, 2008

  Living on the edge (of Rails) #11

  This week’s report covers changes from 3 Mar 2008 to 9 Mar 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

  Improve performance on :include/:conditions/:limit queries by selectively joining in the pre-query

  This is another ActiveRecord performance boost related to the pre-loading any eager-loaded :includes mentioned previously. Basically what this patch does is to only join referenced tables when needed. It does this by checking the :conditions and :limit options to determine whether a table should be joined or can be left out and pre-loaded instead. You can find out more in tickets #9560 and #9497.

  Credit goes to Gabe da Silveira (dasil003 on Trac) for this awesome performance patch.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8977

  Better error message for type errors when parsing request parameters

  Now when you pass an incorrectly formed request (e.g. GET, POST) parameter to your controller, it will raise an exception that includes a friendlier error message that indicates exactly what you passed to it. This is helpful when trying to debug whether you constructed your form correctly.

  Contributors: Chad Humphries and matt.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8986

  Make MimeResponds::Responder#any work without explicit types.

  Here's something I didn't know: you can actually use any in your respond_to blocks as a catch-all response. E.g.

  respond_to do |format|
    format.html do
      redirect_to :action => 'login'
    end
    format.any(:js, :xml) do
      request_http_basic_authentication 'Web Password'
    end
  end

  Contrary to its name, using 'any' actually requires you to pass a list of types to respond to. This has been enhanced now so that if you don't pass any arguments, it'll function as a real catch-all.

  respond_to do |format|
    format.any do
      request_http_basic_authentication 'Web Password'
    end
  end

  Credit goes to Joshua Wehner for this patch.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8987

  Add readonly option to has_many :through associations

  Turns out the :readonly option for associations mentioned earlier was left out for has_many :through associations. This oversight has been fixed.

  Thanks to Emilio Tagua for this bugfix.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8989

  As usual, let me know of any inaccuracies or any suggestions you may have in the comments!

• Mar 5, 2008

  Living on the edge (of Rails) #10

  Another awfully sleepy week on Rails edge. Though by the time I had sent over the notes to Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of the awesome Rails Envy podcast, there has been some nice changes (that I'll be mentioning next week, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from checking those out yourself).

  In other interesting news, Pratik Naik (lifofifo), a long-time Rails contributor has been given commit rights to Rails. Congrats Pratik, well-deserved and it has been long overdue in my opinion! Pratik keeps an interesting blog at http://m.onkey.org/ (where he's not afraid to say "fuck" in his posts and his code) and hangs out an awful lot on #rubyonrails and #rails-contrib on IRC.

  As a sidenote, Capistrano 2.2.0 was released by Jamis last week.

  This week’s report covers changes from 25 Feb 2008 to 2 Mar 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

  Time#end_of_XXX methods

  A bunch of Time core extension methods have been added. These are: Time#end_of_day, Time#end_of_week, Time#end_of_year, and Time#end_of_quarter, which all return exactly what you expect them to return:

  Time.now.end_of_week # => Sun Mar 09 00:00:00 0800 2008

  Credit goes to Juanjo Bazán (a former Rails Hackfest winner) and Tarmo Tänav for contributing this patch.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8934

  Date helpers now accept HTML options

  ActionView's date helpers (such as date_select, time_select, select_datetime) did not support any HTML options, unlike the other helpers (like f.text_field(:name, :class => 'my_css_class', :size => 20)). This inconsistency has been fixed and you can now finally do:

  <%= date_select 'user', 'birthday', :order => [:day], :class => 'my_css_class' %>

  Murray Steele (h-lame on the Rails Trac) and Jakob Skjerning contributed this patch.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8968

  No need for explicit respond_to for RJS templates

  ActionController has been changed so that JS requests will automatically render action.js.rjs files without the need to specify an explicit respond_to block. This means that your .rjs files work the same way as your .html.erb files - just put them in the right place and Rails will use it.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8956

  Bugfixes

  • http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8937 - Prevent Rails from crashing when trying to deserialize an XML representation of a model named "Type" (using Hash#from_xml). Contributed by Juanjo Bazán and Isaac Feliu.
  • http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8942 - Fix eager loading so that it doesn't pull in duplicate records in some cases. Contributed by Catfish.

  As usual, let me know of any inaccuracies or any suggestions you may have in the comments!

• Feb 27, 2008

  Living on the edge (of Rails) #9 - the sleeper edition

  It's been a slow week on the Rails trunk this week in terms of exciting changes.

  This week’s report covers changes from 18 Feb 2008 to 24 Feb 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

  ActiveResource::Base now accepts user and password configuration

  You can now set the user and password for HTTP authentication in your ActiveResource models:

  class Person < ActiveResource::Base
    self.site = 'http://example.com/'
    self.user = 'konata'
    self.password = 'password'
  end

  This is a better way to specify authentication credentials than the current way of doing it by putting it all in the site (e.g. self.site = 'http://konata:password@example.com/').

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8891

  script/plugin install now supports SVN export

  You can now pass the -e/--export option to script/plugin install to do an Subversion export of the plugin. This allows you to then check in the plugin's files into your own repository. Though seriously, if anyone really wants to do this, I'd suggest they use Piston. That is, for those of us still using Subversion rather than Git.

  Related changeset: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8921

  Bug fixes for associations preloading

  There've been some bug fixes the associations preloading change mentioned in Living on the edge #5:

  • http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8894 - Fixed a bug where associations that were preloaded (using nested :includes) errors out when the associations return nil (i.e. when there are no associated records).
  • http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/11154 - Fixed a bug where nested includes were assuming that all records are from the same class. This is not true for polymorphic associations, causing problems when they were being used.

  Yup, that's it for this week. As usual, let me know of anything I might have missed or any suggestions you may have in the comments!

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