If this happens to you:

user.avatar = Avatar.new
user.avatar  # => nil

(where avatar is a belongs_to), you probably declared your association incorrectly.

Always do

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :avatar
end

and never

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to 'avatar'
end

Cucumber_rails' old-school web-steps have been deprecated for a while, urging developers to write high-level step definitions that directly use Capybara or Webrat.

We think that's a bit drastic. More high-level steps are good, but ticking the odd check box with a general step is not always bad.

So we took the old web steps, improved them a bit, added some other favorites of ours (steps for emails, tables, [time travelling](/ma...

There is no reason to leave trailing whitespace characters in your project's files, so don't add any.

A git diff --check will tell you if there are any and you should not commit when you see them. So go ahead and switch your editor/IDE to automatically remove them for you.
Below are a few instructions on how to get them removed by your favorite IDE or editor.

Note that except for RubyMine, the following changes will remove trailing white-space on all lines, not only those that you changed.
While this should not be a problem if your proje...

TL;DR Avoid before(:context) (formerly before(:all)), use before(:example) (formerly before(:each)) instead.

If you do use before(:context), you need to know what you are doing and take care of any cleanup yourself.

Why?

Understand this:

• before(:context) is run when the context/describe block begins,
• before(:context) is run outside of transactions, so data created here will bleed into other specs
• before(:example) is run before each spec inside it,

Generally, you'll want a clean setup for each s...

Today I got a better understanding of how git works, in particular what git checkout and git reset do.

Git basics

• A commit holds a certain state of a directory and a pointer to its antecedent commit.
• A commit is identified by a so-called ref looking something like 7153617ff70e716e229a823cdd205ebb13fa314d.
• HEAD is a pointer that is always pointing at the commit you are currently working on. Usually, it is pointing to a branch which is pointing to that commit.
• Branches are nothing but pointers to commits. Y...

Given you store files on Amazon S3 and you need to stream those files out to people while you don't want them to be able to distribute the content simply by sharing the S3 URL.

You could either mark the bucket as private and fetch the appropriate files from S3 to your application server and stream them to the client finally. While this is possible, I'd recommend to use what AWS calls "Query String Authentication".

If you're using Paperclip you can chose between two sto...

StaticMatic is a nice tool to build simple static websites.
In case you want to have some nifty styles on the navigation item that is currently active, you can use this:

=link 'Aktuelles', :class => (current_page =~ /aktuelles/) ? 'current' : 'default'

Keep in mind that current_page gives you the full relative path of your page. raise current_path in case you're not sure.

I know there is an navigation helper out there. I did not use it and also did not want to migrate.

When you work in the MySQL console and you want to see which database is used, type:

SELECT database();

The result you see is the database you would activate with

USE database_name;

We frequently use the handy Paperclip Gem to manage file attachments.

If you need to move the files from local storage (i.e., your servers' harddisk) to Amazon S3, you can simply change settings for Paperclip to use the S3 storage adapter and use this script to migrate to S3. Put the snippet into a chore if you don't want to run that in the console.
YOUR_LOCAL_STORAGE_MODEL_DIRECTORY should be something like 'storage/your_model'.

Dir.glob(YOUR_LOCAL_STORAGE_MODEL_DIRECTORY**/*).each do |path|...

If you want to update some records with boolean fields in a migration, always remember to set your values with field=#{quoted_true} and field=#{quoted_false}. The Rails methods quoted_false and quoted_true return the correct boolean representations for your database.

A print stylesheet is easy to create. Choose a font suited for paper, hide some elements, done. Unfortunately print stylesheets often break as the application is developed further, because they are quickly forgotten and nobody bothers to check if their change breaks the print stylesheet.

This card describes how to write a simple Cucumber feature that tests some aspects of a print stylesheets. This way, the requirement of having a print stylesheet is manifested in your tests and cannot be inadvertedly removed from the code. Note that you can...

This article describes how to reset MySQL's or MariaDB's root password on your workstation. It's meant for local development purposes only, don't do this in production. This article will also help you if you have a fairly recent MariaDB version that uses authentication based on linux users instead of passwords for the root user and you prefer using a password for root.

Solution

Step 1 is getting a root mysql shell that allows us to change user credentials. We need to stop the mysql daemon first and re-start it without authorization c...

Assuming the following sunspot setup of the post class:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchable do
    text :title
    string :state
    integer :category_ids
  end
end

In Sunspot you can scope your search via the with method. It allows you to do stuff like:

Post.search {
  fulltext "your query", :fields => :title
  with(:category_ids).any_of([1,2,3,4,5])
}

If you want to scope your search based on a text field, you have to add another field of the type string (such as the state fi...

Note: Instead of using the method in this card, you probably want to use ActiveType's nested attributes which is a much more refined way of doing this.

The attached Modularity trait allows you to accept nested attributes for a record that is not an association, e.g.:

    class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
      
      def home_page
        @home_page ||= Page.find_by_name('home')
      end
      
      does 'a...

When committing, you should always check the diff of your changes so you don't include any leftovers or irrelevant/bad changes. Any time spent on that is well invested as it saves you rejected merge requests or any mess you need to clean up later.

While you can just use git diff or git diff --cached (to diff staged changes), you can also have Git include the changes as a comment below the commit message:

git commit -v

That will open up the usual commit "file" in your preferred text editor, but it will include a diff below the s...

Sometimes you need to look at the filter chain in specs. You can do it like that on Rails 2:

controller.class.filter_chain.map(&:method)

Note that we need to look at the controller's class since before_filter and after_filter stuff happens on the class level.

Also mind that the above code will give you all filters, both those run before and after an action. You can query before? and after? on the filter objects to scope down to only some of them:

controller.class.filter_chain.select(&:before?).map(&:method)

For Rails 3, ...

So your Cucumber feature sometimes dies with this exception:

Modal Dialog Present (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnhandledAlertError)

As a seasoned Selenium veteran you are used to misleading error messages. Hence you might be surprised that the reason for this particular error is that there is actually a modal dialog present and preventing Selenium from executing commands like click or page.have_css?.

How your code triggers this issue

The reason why a dialog is shown is somewhat fucked ...

How delayed jobs can make your after_save callbacks execute before the record is saved.

For string columns, MySQL indexes the left side of a string. That means an index can speed a like query that has a wildcard on the right side:

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE field LIKE "bar%" # will be faster with an index

It can not speed up a query that has a variable left side:

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE field LIKE "%bar%" # will not be faster with an index

That also means if you use the ancestry gem you should index your ancestry column if you use scopes like descendants or `su...

You can quickly access views that belong to a controller by using the tiny "page with arrow" icon in the gutter:

Access a method's view file

Click the icon next to the method definition in the controller.

If a view file does not yet exist, RubyMine will prompt you for its filename.

All views & partials associated to a controller

For a list of all views and partials that belong to the current ...

Be careful when stubbing out attributes on records that are defined by associations. Nothing is as it seems to be.

The associated record has its own universe of things; when delegating calls to it, you ca not stub methods on the associated record and expect them to be around. That is a general issue with this pattern/approach.

What's happening?

Consider these classes:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :thread
  
  def thread_title
    thread.title
  end
end

class Thread < Acti...

So you got this error, even though your Gemfile bundles mysql2:

!!! Missing the mysql2 gem. Add it to your Gemfile: gem 'mysql2'

or

Please install the mysql adapter: `gem install activerecord-mysql-adapter` (mysql is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile.)

The reason for this confusing error message is probably that your Gemfile says mysql2, but your database.yml still uses the mysql adapter. Change it to use the mysql2 adapter:

development:
  adapter: mysql2
  database: myproject_developm...

The next version of MySQL will include a built-in memcached daemon. This daemon can quickly get and set key/value pairs from and to InnoDB tables while completely bypassing the parsing and planning overhead of SQL.

This could potentially be very awesome because we would then have a distributed key/value store that stores data in a way it can also be queried with complex SQL queries.