Case sensitivity in PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, unlike MySQL, treats strings as case sensitive in all circumstances.
This includes
- comparison with
=
andLIKE
- collision detection in unique indexes
Usually this is fine, but some strings (like emails and usernames) should typically be treated as case insensitive.
There are a few workarounds available:
- use the citext extension (not recommended)
- use
ILIKE
instead ofLIKE
- use Postgres'
lower()
function - add an index on
lower(email)
Probably th...
How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Why improve your code reviews?
Improving code review technique helps your reviewer, your team, and, most importantly: you.
Learn faster: If you prepare your changelist properly, it directs your reviewer’s attention to areas that support your growth rather than boring style violations. When you demonstrate an appreciation for constructive criticism, your reviewer provides better feedback .
Make others better: Your code review techniques set an example for your colleagues. Effective author practices rub off on your teammates, which...
PostgreSQL: How to use with_advisory_lock to prevent race conditions
If you want to prevent that two processes run some code at the same time you can use the gem with_advisory_lock.
What happens
- The thread will wait indefinitely until the lock is acquired.
- While inside the block, you will exclusively own the advisory lock.
- The lock will be released after your block ends, even if an exception is raised in the block.
This is usually required if there is no suitable database row to lock on.
Example
You want to generate a...
Allow capybara to click on labels instead of inputs for checkboxes
Within Capybara you most certainly use the #check
- and #uncheck
-method to (un)check checkboxes.
But there's one problem, if you want to test a custom styled checkbox, which hides its <input>
-Tag:
- The methods cannot (un)check checkboxes without an visible
<input>
. - The error message will be something like:
Unable to find visible checkbox "Some label" that is not disabled
Solution 1
Use the keyword argument allow_label_click: true
within the method call.
So instead of check('Some label')
, use `check('Some label', allow...
Fast rubocop autocorrection alias
The rubocop
binary has a few interesting flags:
-
rubocop
(using the--parallel
default ) scans the current repository for linting issues while using multiple CPU cores -
rubocop -a
(or--autocorrect
) safely corrects most offenses while doing a sequential scan -
rubocop -A
(or--autocorrect-all
) also tries to correct unsafe suggestions
Autocorrection takes significantly longer on large projects because of the sequential nature.
To speed things up, you can use the following alias. It first checks in parallel if any files...
The numericality validator does not care about your BigDecimal precision
Looking at the source code of the validates_numericality_of validator, it becomes clear that it converts the attribute in question to either an integer or float:
if configuration[:only_integer]
unless raw_value.to_s =~ /\A[+-]?\d+\Z/
record.errors.add(attr_name, configuration[:message] || ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages[:not_a_number])
next
end
raw_value = raw_value.to_i
else
begin
raw_value = Kernel.Float(raw_val...
What edge_rider offers you
edge_rider is Power tools for ActiveRecord relations (scopes). Please note that some of the functions edge_rider provides have native implementations in newer rails versions.
Useful in applications
Relation#traverse_association(*names)
Edge Rider gives your relations a method #traverse_association
which returns a new relation by "pivoting" around a named association. You can traverse multiple associations in a single call. E.g. to turn a relation of posts into a relation of all posts o...
Git: Advisory for cherry-picks to production branches
We often have a separate production branch that lags a bit behind the more cutting edge main branch. Sometimes you want to move some, but not all commits from main to production. This can be done with a git cherry-pick
.
However, this may lead to considerable pain later, since git does not understand the commits are actually "the same". Hazards are unnecessary and hard to resolve conflicts as well as incorrect auto-merges.
In order to avoid this, always merge the production branch back to the main after the cherry-pick. Even t...
Be careful when using buttons without a "type" attribute
Be careful when using buttons without a type
attribute, since browsers will consider them the default submit button of a form.
Suppose you have this form:
<form action="/save">
<input type="text" />
<button onclick="alert('Alert!')">Alert</button>
<button type="submit">Save</button>
</form>
If you press the enter key inside in the text input, browsers will trigger the first button and show the alert.
To fix this, add a type="button"
attribute to the first button.
We have deprecated Rack::SteadyETag
Rack::SteadyETag
was a Rack middleware that generates the same default ETag
for responses that only differ in XOR-masked CSRF tokens or CSP nonces.
We have deprecated Rack::SteadyETag. We instead recommend reconfiguring your Rails app so two requests to the same resource produce the same HTML for a given user.
Rails: Fixing ETags that never match
Every Rails response has a default ETag
header. In theory this would enable caching for multiple requests to the same resource. Unfortunately the default ETags produced by Rails are effectively random, meaning they can never match a future request.
Understanding ETags
When your Rails app responds with ETag
headers, future requests to the same URL can be answered with an empty response if the underlying content ha...
Operators "in" and "of" are very inconsistent between CoffeeScript and JavaScript
CoffeeScript and JavaScript (ECMAScript) both have operators in
and of
. Each language use them for more than one purpose. There is not a single case where the same operator can be used for the same purpose in both languages.
Check if an object (or its prototype) has a property
CoffeeScript
var hasFoo = 'foo' of object
JavaScript
var hasFoo = 'foo' in object;
Iterate through all properties of an object
================================...
Popular mistakes when using nested forms
Here are some popular mistakes when using nested forms:
- You are using
fields_for
instead ofform.fields_for
. - You forgot to use
accepts_nested_attributes
in the containing model. Rails won't complain, but nothing will work. In particular,nested_form.object
will benil
. - The
:reject_if
option lambda in youraccepts_nested_attributes
call is defined incorrectly. Raise the attributes hash given to your:reject_if
lambda to see if it looks like you expect. - If you are nesting forms into nested forms, each model involved ne...
Test-Driven Development with integration and unit tests: a pragmatic approach
Test-Driven Development (TDD) in its most dogmatic form (red-green-refactor in micro-iterations) can be tedious. It does not have to be this way! This guide shows a pragmatic approach with integration and unit tests, that works in practice and improves on productivity.
Advantages
- No added effort: tests need to be written anyway.
- Test heads serve as todo lists. You'll always know what is finished and what is left to do.
- Big tasks are broken down into smaller tasks that can be processed one by one.
- You will not forget a test.
- You...
Modern CSS supports individual transform properties
tl;dr
Individual transform properties are great because they allow you to write more readable and maintainable CSS, especially when applying multiple transformations and/or when animating transforms.
For ages, CSS transforms had to be defined using the transform
property. For a single transformation, this was something like transform: scale(1.5)
, and multiple transformations could be applied by chaining them.
.example {
transform: scale(1.5) rotate(45deg) translateY(-50%);
}
All modern browsers (Chrome & Edge ...
ASDF: A Version Manager To Rule Them All
tl;dr
asdf
allows you to manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool and is backwards compatible by supporting existing config files, like e.g..nvmrc
or.ruby-version
.
Getting Started
- Disable rbenv
1.1 Delete or comment outsource /home/$user/.rbenvrc
in~/.profile
1.2 Delete or comment oureval "$(rbenv init -)"
in~/.bashrc
or~/.zshrc
1.3 To take effect you may have to restart your shell or log out and log in again from your current linux session - Install asdf by following the official ...
Jasmine: Preventing unhandled promise rejections from failing your test
You have an async function that rejects:
async function failingFunction() {
throw new Error("Something went wrong")
}
When you call that function in a test, your test will fail:
it('has a test', function() {
failingFunction() // this will fail your test
})
The failure message will look like this:
Unhandled promise rejection: Error: Something went wrong
You can fix this by expecting the state of the returned promise:
it('has a test', async function() {
await expectAsync(failingFunction()).toBeRej...
Decide whether cronjobs should run on one or all servers
Understanding your type of cronjob
Some cronjobs must only run on a single server. E.g. when you run nightly batch operations on the database, it should probably run on a single server. Running it on multiple servers would likely result in deadlocks or corrupt data.
Some cronjobs must always run on all servers. E.g. starting a sidekiq process on reboot.
Configuring whenever
If not configured otherwise, cronjobs defined in whenever's `s...
Take care of indentation and blank lines when using .erb for plain text emails
Building plain text emails with an .erb template doesn't allow you to indent code like you normally do in HTML mails.
❌ DON'T
<%= 'foo' if bar %>
"\n"
if bar is false
"foo\n"
if bar is true
<%= nil %>
"\n"
<% if true %>
<%= 'foo' %>
<% end %>
" foo"
<%= 'foo' %>
<%= 'bar' %>
"foo\n\nbar\n"
✔️ DO
Write unindented code to get the expected result.
<% if bar %>
<%= 'bar' %>
<% end %>
<%= 'foo' %>
<%= 'bar' %>
- Use [Form Models](https://github.com/mak...
RSpec: Run a single spec (Example or ExampleGroup)
RSpec allows you to mark a single Example/ExampleGroup so that only this will be run. This is very useful when using a test runner like guard.
Add the following config to spec/spec_helper.rb
:
RSpec.configure do |config|
# These two settings work together to allow you to limit a spec run
# to individual examples or groups you care about by tagging them with
# `:focus` metadata. When nothing is tagged with `:focus`, all examples
# get run.
config.filter_run_including :focus => true
config.run_all_when_everything_filtere...
CSP: strict-dynamic
tl;dr
The
strict-dynamic
source list keyword allows you to simplify your CSP policy by favoring hashes and nonces over domain host lists.The key super power of
strict-dynamic
is that it will allow to load additional scripts via non-"parser-inserted" script elements.
For unsupported browsers, your script can be made backwards compatible by doing something like this:
script-src 'nonce-rAnd0m' 'strict-dynamic' https: 'self'
default-s...
Jasmine: Adding custom matchers
Definition
A matcher is a function that returns an object with a compare
key. Usually it is registered with beforeEach
:
beforeEach(() => {
jasmine.addMatchers({
// Example matcher
toBeAnything() {
return {
compare(actualValue, ...matcherArguments) {
// Do some computations here ...
// Return whether the actualValue matches the expectation
return {pass: true}
}
}
}
})
})
Usage
expect(actualValue).toBeAnything(...matcherArg...
Use find_in_batches or find_each to deal with many records efficiently
Occasionally you need to do something directly on the server -- like having all records recalculate something that cannot be done in a migration because it takes a long time.
Let's say you do something like this:
Project.all.each(&:recalculate_statistics!)
Even though you may have been successful with this on your development machine or the staging server, keep in mind that production machines often hold a lot more records. Using all
may just work, even with lots of records, but when you iterate over such records and fetch a...
CSS: Combining different length units with calc()
calc()
lets you mix CSS units. Ever wanted to give an element "the container's width minus 20px on each side"? Here you go:
.foo {
width: calc(100% - (20px * 2));
}
When using Sass, you need to interpolate Sass expressions:
$margin: 20px * 2
.foo
width: calc(100% - #{$margin})
Supported by all modern browsers and IE9+.