theRailWorld.com blog

green_light, Client Side Validation for Rails

Phil — 2011-04-04T19:04:58Z

Maybe it's me, but there seems to be a severe lack of good client-side validation plugins, which integrate with ActiveModel. So, my employer, Rumble Labs kindly gave me some time to write one of our own, for use with internal projects and personal use.

green_light is a client-side validation gem which makes use of the jQuery Validation Plugin. The beauty of this gem, is that your validation rules are still defined in the model.

Give it a go!

Download green_light

Download jQuery Validation Plugin

VIM gnome-256color not known

Phil — 2011-02-17T20:35:23Z

This one always troubles me each time I need to re-install Ubuntu. The solution?

 sudo apt-get install ncurses-term

Done.

Forms Disappeared when upgrading to Rails 3.0.0

Phil — 2010-09-22T12:58:39Z

Just upgraded one of my apps from Rails 3.0.0rc4 to Rails 3.0.0. One issue - all the forms disappeared! After doing some hunting, I found that the issue was being caused by the HAML gem. To fix this, upgrade to the 3.0.18 release of the HAML gem.

Wildcard Subdomains with Dnsmasq

Phil — 2010-07-15T10:23:39Z

Interacting with Controllers via the app object

Phil — 2010-07-13T16:00:16Z

ActionController:: InvalidAuthenticityToken with Destroy action

Phil — 2010-07-05T20:39:41Z

fieldWithErrors is now field_with_errors in Rails3

Phil — 2010-07-01T10:38:21Z

This one confused the hell out of me. Suddenly, my css styling of the fieldWithErrors div stopped working. Turns out this has been changed to fieldwitherrors. Check it out here.

The change seems to have taken place between beta 3 and beta 4.

Using vim with irb

Phil — 2010-06-22T09:24:23Z

error_messages_for is_no_more

Phil — 2010-05-16T16:07:00Z

Worth noting that errormessagesfor is not included, by default, in Rails 3. If you check your console server log you'll see this warning:-

DEPRECATION WARNING: error_messages_for was removed from Rails and is now available as a plugin. 
Please install it with `rails plugin install git://github.com/rails/dynamic_form.git`.

After you install the plugin, everything works as expected.

Issue with localhost subdomains in Rails 3

Phil — 2010-05-09T20:42:58Z

While upgrading one of my Rails 2.3 apps to Rail 3, I came across a few issues when using subdomains with a localhost domain. I have a route like so:-

 root :to => 'controller#page', :constraints => {:subdomain => "subdomain1"}

I had a test subdomain set-up in my /etc/hosts file as usual. For instance, here is the first line in my /etc/hosts file:-

 127.0.0.1  subdomain1.localhost

So, if I request the url subdomain1.localhost:3000, Rails 3 treats "subdomain1.localhost" as the domain. In other words, it is treating "localhost" as the TLD.

To fix this I changed my test subdomain, in the /etc/hosts file, to have a TLD, like so:-

 127.0.0.1  subdomain1.localhost.local

And hey presto, as if by magic, it now works.

UPDATE: Changed TLD to .local (makes more sense)

Compass CSS3 Cross-Browser Mixins

Phil — 2010-05-04T20:14:15Z

I've been having a great time using Compass when working on meetee recently. In particular, I've been making use of the CSS3 mixins.

The mixins for Text Shadow, Box Shadow and Gradient have been really useful. No need to worry about any cross-browser compatibility issues - compass takes care of this for you. Plus you're left with more concise code.

The new documentation is looking really nice as well! Highly recommended.

Using Rack Middleware in Rails3

Phil — 2010-02-17T10:32:20Z

Disable ActiveRecord in Rails 3

Phil — 2010-02-12T20:44:12Z

Came up against this recently when trying to upgrade a Rails app which was using MongoDB. Obviously I didn't want to use ActiveRecord, so I set about removing it.

The old way of removing ActiveRecord was to place this line in the environment.rb file, "config.frameworks -= [ :active_record ]". However, in Rails 3 you can simply pass the "-O" switch to the rails command, like so:-

 rails yourapp -O

But what if you've already created your app? If you look in your config/application.rb file, you'll see this line at the top:-

 require 'rails/all'

This does what it says on the tin; includes all rails modules. If you want to exclude ActiveRecord, remove the above line and replace it with:-

 # Pick the frameworks you want:
 # require "active_record/railtie"
 require "action_controller/railtie"
 require "action_mailer/railtie"
 require "active_resource/railtie"
 require "rails/test_unit/railtie"

This is the beauty of Rails 3, pick and choose what suits you.

Using Prototype and JQuery with Rails3 (UJS)

Phil — 2010-02-11T21:18:48Z

Sorting an EmbeddedDocument with MongoMapper

Phil — 2010-01-20T11:55:23Z

A look at themes with Compass (Part 1)

Phil — 2009-11-26T21:02:57Z

Sunspot Full-text Search for Rails/Ruby

Phil McClure — 2009-10-24T16:46:03Z

Sass and the Compass Framework

Phil McClure — 2009-10-14T19:27:11Z

My Experience with Compass

So, as you may have noticed, I have given the site a bit of a make over... and I thought it may be nice to make my first post be about the tools that I used to create the new look. In particular I want to talk about the wonderful Compass CSS framework.

Compass

Compass is what I would call a "real" CSS framework. Tools like Blueprint and 960 Grid have been classed as frameworks but really, they are just grid systems. If we think of other types of frameworks like .NET, Cake, Rails, they all provide an abstraction of the given language in order to save us from having to re-implement common functionality. With the help of Sass, this is exactly what Compass does.

Sass

It's worth saying a few word about Sass. Sass is an intermediate language which allows you to do a lot more than you can with standard CSS, the best of which are:-

You can define variables
You can define reusable blocks of code called mixins

In addition to this the syntax is much more concise. With these great features Sass looks like it might outshine it's sister project haml.

Back to my experience with Compass

I used Compass along with Rails to create this site and it really has been the most pleasurable experience I've had when styling a site.

When dealing with styling on past sites, I frequently ended up with one CSS file which included all the styling for the entire site. This is not a good way to approach styling for a few reasons. First of all, it makes it harder to create reusable pieces of code. Second, having all the code packed into one file results in unreadable unstructured code.

Compass and Sass changes all of this and more! Compass provides some common functionality via mixins plus I can create reusable blocks of code using Sass. Further to this, Compass includes wrappers for grid sytems, such as Blueprint, so you can leverage off them. It doesn't end here - ~~Compass~~ Sass allows you to define "partials" similar to that of Rails. These are great for separating your code to make things more modular... and if you're thinking that these extra files will result in more http requests to the server, you'd be wrong. As I said, Sass is an intermediate language meaning it ultimately needs to be compiled into CSS - so you can potentially end up with one CSS file and you can even compile it in compressed mode!

I can't recommend this approach enough. So, for you next project, give it a go.

Installing Sass

sass-lang.com/download.html

Installing Compass

wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/getting-started

Caching with Rails Part 1: Page Caching

Phil McClure — 2009-09-01T00:00:00Z

Nested Object Forms in Rails 2.3

Phil McClure — 2009-09-01T00:00:00Z