You have multiple options:

1. Just don't have a type column. All STI magic will be disabled automatically.
2. If you have a type column but want to use it for something else (WAT?), you can set self.inheritance_column = :_non_existing_column in the class definition
3. (Untested) In the parent class, set self.abstract_class = true

This technique is useful to implement form models / presenters, where you want all the goodness of Ac...

Sometimes you need a piece of code to do something different for specs than for features. If you don't have separate environments, you can't check your Rails.env.

I managed to distinguish between specs and features by asking Capybara.

Note that this only works when you do not use Capybara in specs.

if defined?(Capybara) and Capybara.respond_to?(:current_driver)
  # you're in a Cucumber scenario
else
  # you're probably in a spec
end

You could omit the defined?(Capybara) condition, if you are sure that Capybara...

When you want to do a git diff but do not care about the full diff and just want to know which files changed, use the --name-only switch:

$ git diff --name-only
app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb
app/models/user.rb
features/sign_in.feature

To include some brief information about changed lines, use the --stat switch:

$ git diff --stat
app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb |    8 +-
app/models/user.rb                     |   30 ++++
features/sign_in.feature               |  136 +++++++++++++++++

T...

All Rubyists should be familiar with the common definitions for include and extend. You include a module to add instance methods to a class and extend to add class methods. Unfortunately, this common definition isn’t entirely accurate. It fails to explain why we use instance.extend(Module) to add methods to an instance. Shouldn’t it be instance.include(Module)? To figure this out we’re going to start by discussing where methods are stored.

• include: Adds methods from the provided Module to the object
• extend: Calls include on the single...

Note: This technique is confusing and slows down your test suite.

Copy the attached code to features/support. This gets you a new Cucumber tag @no_parallel which ensures that the tagged scenario does not run in parallel with other scenarios that are tagged with @no_parallel. Other scenarios not tagged will @no_parallel can still run in parallel with the tagged test. Please read the previous sentence again.

This can help when multiple test processes that access a single resource that is hard to shar...

yaml4r is a juxtaposition of yaml documents and their Ruby couterpart. Thus, it does a great job as YAML-doc, e.g. when writing Rails locale files. Did you know that ...

• << is a merge key (similar to & in SASS)
• there are variables, called aliases. Definition: &alias Some content, usage: *alias.

Caveats

Specifying a key twice does not merge the sub keys, but override the first definition, e.g.

de:
  car: # overridden
    door: Tür
 ...

The User-Agent HTTP header identifies the client and is sent by "regular" browsers, search engine crawlers, or other web client software.

Cucumber

In Rack::Test, you can set your user agent like this on Capybara:

Given /^my user agent is "(.+)"$/ do |agent|
  page.driver.browser.header('User-Agent', agent)
  # Or, for older Capybaras:
  # page.driver.header('User-Agent', agent)
end

For Selenium tests with Firefox, it seems you can set the general.useragent.override profile setting to your preferred value. [See StackOver...

Ever wondered about the difference between def and define_method? Turns out there are three implicit contexts in Ruby. def and define_method differ in which one they use.

def

• Ruby keyword, starts a method definition
• Opens a new, isolated scope. Variables defined outside are not accessible inside and vice versa.
• Defines an instance method on the receiver (specified before the method name, e.g. def object.foo); implicit receiver is the default definee

The default definee is not self and...

When a controller action redirects to an external URL (like http://somehost.com/some/path) you will find that this is hard to test with Cucumber and Capybara:

• A non-Javascript Rack::Test scenario will just ignore the host and try to open /some/path in your local application
• A Selenium test will actually follow the redirect, which you probably don't want either

There are two workarounds for this. You can use either, or a combination of both.

1. Write a controller spec

Controller specs can test if a resp...

Unfortunately, Capybara does not offer a switch to disable cookies in your test browser. However, you can work around that by using a tiny Rack middleware -- it works for both Selenium and non-Selenium tests.

Wouldn't it be nice to say something like this?

Given cookies are disabled
When I try to sign in
Then I should see "Can't sign you in. Please enable cookies."

You can! Put the code below into some place like lib/rack/cookie_stripper.rb.

module Rack
  class CookieStripper
    
    ENABLED = false

...

To set a cookie in your test browser for cucumber tests, you need to know which driver you are using. Use the step below according to your driver.

Rack::Test

Given /^I have a "([^\"]+)" cookie set to "([^\"]+)"$/ do |key, value|
  headers = {}
  Rack::Utils.set_cookie_header!(headers, key, value)
  cookie_string = headers['Set-Cookie']

  Capybara.current_session.driver.browser.set_cookie(cookie_string)
end

Note that Rack::Utils is only used to find out the correct cookie header string (you don't want to generate it yours...

The following code doesn't work like expected:

page.find(css_selector).find(other_css_selector)

The second .find will search the whole dom instead of a scope.

Rumor has it this is fixed in Capybara 0.4.1.

If you open a pop-up window [1] in your Selenium tests and you want to close it, you can do this:

# Find our target window
handle = page.driver.find_window("My window title")

# Close it
page.driver.browser.switch_to.window(handle)
page.driver.browser.close

# Have the Selenium driver point to another window
last_handle = page.driver.browser.window_handles.last
page.driver.browser.switch_to.window(last_handle)

Mind these:

• find_window returns a window handle, which is something like `"{485fa8bd-fa99-...

If you need to capture signatures on an IPad or similar device, you can use Thomas J Bradley's excellent Signature Pad plugin for jQuery.

To implement, just follow the steps on the Github page.

The form

If you have a model Signature with name: string, signature: text, you can use it with regular rails form like this:

- form_for @signature, :html => { :class => 'signature_form' } do |form|
  %dl
    %dt
      = form...

Counters are an awesome CSS feature you didn't know about. It is supported in all browsers and IE8+.

CSS counters are an implementation of Automatic counters and numbering in CSS 2.1. The value of a counter is manipulated through the use of counter-reset and counter-increment and is displayed on a page using the counter() or counters() function of the content property.

UnicodeUtils implements Unicode algorithms for case conversion, normalization, text segmentation and more in pure Ruby code.

If you don't need the ton of features that UnicodeUtils offers, try stringex.

When you accept a table in your Cucumber step definition, that table object will have the cryptic type Cucumber::Ast::Table. Don't immediately call table.raw to convert it into an array of arrays! Cucumber::Ast::Table has a lot of useful methods for tasks such as:

table.raw

Turn the table into an array of arrays

table.hashes

Convert the table to an array of hashes, where the keys are the table headers from the first row

`table.header...

Spreewald now comes with a step that tests if a form field is visible:

Then the "Due date" field should be visible
But the "Author" field should not be visible

The step works by looking up the field for the given label, then checks if that field is hidden via CSS (or Javascript).

It is not currently tested if the label is visible or hidden. For this see: [Check that an element is visible or hidden via CSS with Cucumber/Capybara](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1049-check-that-an-elem...

We recently had a problem on a Memcache cluster, where one of the servers showed a significantly worse cache hit rate and a lot more evictions.

It turned out that the only reason was that the server was running for a few months longer than the others. Some investigation showed this to be a known problem with Memcache: Once your cache gets full, it might be "hardwired" for your specific usage patterns. If those change (and you for example start to store larger values), memory is no longer allocated optimally, in extreme cases Memcache might ...

Behave.js is a lightweight library for adding IDE style behaviors to plain text areas, making it much more enjoyable to write code in. Features include:

• Custom Code/Behavior Fencing
• Hard and Soft Tabs
• Auto Open/Close Parenthesis, Brackets, Braces, Double and Single Quotes
• Auto delete a paired character
• Overwrite a paired character
• Multi-line Indentation/Unindentation
• Automatic Indentation

The problem

Calling bundle update GEMNAME will update a lot more gems than you think. E.g. when you do this:

bundle update cucumber-rails

... you might think this will only update cucumber-rails. But it actually updates cucumber-rails and all of its dependencies. This will explode in your face when one of these dependencies release a new version with breaking API changes. Which is all the time.

In the example above updating cucumber-rails will give you Capybara 2.0 (because capybara is a dependency of `cucumber-rail...

Calling bundle update (without arguments) updates all your gems at once. Given that many gems don't care about stable APIs, this might break your application in a million ways.

To stay sane, update your gems using the applicable way below:

Projects in active development

Update the entire bundle regularily (e.g. once a week). This ensures that your libraries are up-to-date while it's easy to spot major version bumps which may break the app.

Projects that have not been updated in a while

1. [Update a single gem conservatively](htt...

The Out-of-Band Work feature allows one to perform arbitrary long-running work outside the request/response cycle without blocking HTTP clients. The primary use case is to run the garbage collector in between cycles so that your requests will finish faster because they will not be interrupted by the garbage collector.

Axlsx is an incredible gem to generate "Office Open XML" spreadsheet files (XLSX). Does not break on large spreadsheets and supports a ton of features like graphs.

API looks mature and existing code is easy to migrate when coming from the spreadsheet gem.
The documentation of some methods is a bit out of date, but you'll find your way around the gem's code.

No support for reading files, however. :( If you want to open XLSX spreadsheets (for example to confirm your output in tests), you can use [roo](h...