The problem:

So I had the issue that User input (coming from many different sources and users) often contains the same long word. Maybe that's a super german thing to have lots of long words I have to deal with. This long word needs to be fully visible on small screens but none of the automated word-break solutions offered by css (https://justmarkup.com/articles/2015-07-31-dealing-with-long-words-in-css/) is clever or supported enough to be a good solution. So I…

JavaScripts and CSS should be minified for production use.

In Rails 3.1+ the asset pipeline will take care of this. Thus you're best off using an uncompressed version of your Javascript in development. Also load the non-minified versions of libraries. This way debugging will be easier and you will still get all the minification love once deployed.

In Rails 2.3 and 3.0 you should at least embed external JavaScript libraries in minified form, using something like JavaScript compressor.

If you're using the Capybara webdriver, steps sometimes fail because the browser hasn't finished loading the next page yet, or it still has a pending AJAX request. You'll often see workarounds like

When I wait for the page to load
Then ...

Workarounds like this do not work reliably, will result in flickering tests and should be avoided. There is no known reliable way to detect if the browser has finished loading the page.

Solution

Instead you should wait until you can observe the result of a page load. E.g. if y…

This collection contains some useful design resources for developers. Many of them were mentioned in the Refactoring UI tutorials.

Tutorials

• Refactoring UI Videos
• Refactoring UI Book
• Refactoring UI Chapter Color Palette
• Refactoring UI Chapter Line Height

Dra…

Applications often show or hide elements based on viewport dimensions, or may have components that behave differently (like mobile vs desktop navigation menus).
Since you want your integration tests to behave consistently, you want to set a specific size for your tests' browser windows.

Using WebDriver options / Chrome device metrics

For Google Chrome, the preferred way is setting "device metrics". This allows you to configure dimensions larger than your display and enable/disable touch behavior.

Simply use register_driver to set up…

If you're suffering from a huge de.yml or similiar file, cry no more. Rails lets you freely organize your dictionary files in config/locales.

My organization works like this:

• config/locales/rails.de.yml modified Rails boilerplate
• config/locales/faker.de.yml modified Faker boilerplate
• config/locales/models.de.yml model names, attribute names, assignable_value labels
• `config/locales/views.de.y…

Spreewald comes with a selector_for helper that matches an English term like the user's profile into a CSS selector. This is useful for steps that refer to a particular section of the page, like the following:

Then I should see "Bruce" within the user's profile
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you're too lazy to manually translate English to a CSS selector by adding a line to features/env/selectors.rb, we already have an [auto-mapper to translate English into …

CSS transitions are a simple animation framework that is built right into browsers. No need for Javascript here. They're supported by all browsers.

Basic usage

Transitions are used to animate the path between to property values. For example, to let the text color fade from red to green on hover, the following SASS is used (shorthand syntax):

.element
  color: red
  transition: color .1s
  
  &:hover
    color: green

This tells the browser "whenever the color of an .element changes…

General hints on the DOM

• the root of the DOM is document
• custom elements inherit from HTMLElement. They need a - (dash) in their name, e.g. <notification-box>.
• event listeners don't have event delegation à la .on('click', cssSelector, handler)

Comparison

When an AJAX request raises an exception on the server, Rails will show a minimal error page with only basic information. Because all Unpoly updates work using AJAX requests, you won't get the more detailled better_errors page with the interactive REPL.

Below is an event listener that automatically repeats the request as a full-page load if your development error shows an error page. This means you get…

Some pseudo-elements need to be addressed with vendor prefixes. E.g. ::selection is not supported by Firefox, you need to use ::-moz-selection instead.

What you cannot do is to define a single CSS rule to address both the standard and vendor-prefixed form:

::selection, ::-moz-selection {
  background-color: red;
}

This rule will be ignored by all browsers. The reason is that if a browser doe…

RubyMine comes with a nice way to grep through your project's files: The finder (ctrl + shift + f). Don't be discouraged about the notice 100+ matches in n+ files if your searched keyword is too general or widely used in your project.

RubyMine comes with a few ways to narrow down the resulting list, don't hesitate to apply those filters to speed up your search. Your keybinding might vary based on your personal settings.

File mask (alt + k)

If you already know the file extension of your …

webpack is a very powerful asset bundler written in node.js to bundle (ES6) JavaScript modules, stylesheets, images, and other assets for consumption in browsers.

Webpacker is a wrapper around webpack that handles integration with Rails.

This is a short introduction.

Installation

If you haven't already, you need to install node.js and Yarn.

Then, put

```ruby
gem 'webpacker', '~> 4.x' # check if 4.x is still cu…

Element finding is a central feature of Capybara. Since #find is normally used to get elements from the current page and interact with them, it's a good thing that some Capybara drivers (e.g. Selenium) will wait an amount of time until the expected element shows up. But if Capybara cannot #find it at all, you'll get an error.

if page.find('.that-element')
  # Do something
else
  # Never happens because #find raises
end

In order to simply check whether an element is present, without errors raised, you can use #has_css?. It wil…