You can use String#demodulize from ActiveSupport:

"ActiveRecord::CoreExtensions::String::Inflections".demodulize # => "Inflections"
"Inflections".demodulize                                       # => "Inflections"

When you develop a gem and you have a Gemfile in your project directory, you might be surprised that your gem dependencies aren't already required in your specs. Here is some info that should help you out:

• Bundler actually doesn't automatically require anything. You need to call Bundler.require(:default, :your_custom_group1, ...) for that. The reason why you never had to write this line is that Rails does this for you when it boots the environment.
• That also means that if you have an embedded Rails app in your spec folder (like [h...

Consul 0.4.0 comes with some new features.

Dependencies

• Consul no longer requires assignable_values, it's optional for when you want to use the authorize_values_for macro.
• Consul no longer uses ActiveSupport::Memoizable because that's deprecated in newer Railses. Consul now uses Memoizer for this.

Temporarily change the current power

When you set Power.current to a power in an RS...

paper_trail is an excellent gem to track record versions and changes.

You almost never want to reimplement something like it yourself. If you need to log some extra information, you can add them on top.

It comes with a really good README file that holds lots of examples. I'll show you only some of its features here:

• Setting up a model to track changes

  Just add has_paper_trail to it:
  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_paper_trail
  end

• Accessing a previous version

  Saying user.previous_version gi...

The will_paginate gem will show a default of 30 records per page.
If you want to test pagination in a Cucumber feature, you don't want to create 31 records just for that.

Instead, you probably want to modify the number of items shown, by saying something like this:

Given we paginate after 2 users

Using the following step definition, you now can! :)

require 'cucumber/rspec/doubles'

Given /^paginate after (\d+) (.*)$/ do |per_page, model_name|
  model = model_name.singularize.gsub(/...

Sometimes, you may want to open up a second database connection, to a read slave or another database. When doing that, you must make sure you don't overwrite an existing connection.

The problem

While this may look good, it will actually cause all kinds of trouble:

def with_other_database
  ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(slave_settings)
  yield
ensure
  ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(master_settings)
end

Putting aside that you are setting the general connection here (not generally a ...

For my Gem Session project Holly I ran the Ironman of drag'n'drop implementations:

• Dragging in nested lists
• User-definable order of items
• Complicated item elements with super-custom CSS and other Javascript functionality
• Items that can be both leaves and containers of other items
• has_ancestry on the server side

Things I learned:

• Be ready to write a lot of CSS. You need to indicate what is being dragged, where it will be dropped, if it is dropped above, below o...

Today, I ran into trouble on a fairly fresh installed VM, running Ubuntu. I tried to bundle install and got this stacktrace:

Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.Unfortunately, a fatal error has occurred. Please see the Bundler 
troubleshooting documentation at http://bit.ly/bundler-issues. Thanks! 
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- net/https (LoadError)
	from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
	from /usr/li...

When you use method_missing to have an object return something on a method call, always make sure you also redefine respond_to_missing?.

If you don't do it, nothing will break at a first glance, but you will run into trouble eventually.

Consider this class:

class Dog
  
  def method_missing(method_name, *args, &block)
    if method_name == :bark
      'woof!'
    else
      super
    end
  end
  
end

This will allow you to say:

Dog.new.bark
=> "woof!"

But:

Dog.new.respond_to? :bark
=> false
```...

When refactoring a sequence of steps to a new, more descriptive step, you can use the steps method and Ruby's %-notation like this:

Given 'I have an article in my cart' do
  steps %(
    When I go the article list
    And I open the first article
    And I press "Add to cart"
  )
end

This way you can simply copy the steps over without any changes.

Warning: Apparently, steps processes its argument with the Gherkin parse...

You can specify the version of bundler to execute a command (most often you need an older version of bundler, but don't want to uninstall newer ones):

bundle _1.0.10_ -v
Bundler version 1.0.10

An example is rails 3.2, which freezes bundler at version ~> 1.0:

Bundler could not find compatible versions for gem "bundler":
  In Gemfile: rails (~> 3.2) was resolved to 3.2.0, which depends on bundler (~> 1.0)

Current Bundler version: bundler (1.13.6)

You can solve this with:

gem install bundler -v 1....

It's the last bugfix release. We will get another year of security fixes, then no more patches.

Updated the card with our current best practice (shared app code and specs via symlinks).

• has_defaults is now a gem, no longer a plugin.
• The plugin version no longer exists. Note that plugins are no longer supported in 3.2.
• If you are working on an application that has the plugin version of has_defaults there is no advantage to be gained from upgrading the gem. The gem is there for you should you one day upgrade to Rails 3.2+.
• Please don't use the defaults gem which we original forked away from in 2009. It sets defaults when a field is `bl...

ActiveSupport::Memoizable will be removed from Rails and has a lot of strange caveats that will ruin your day.

Use the Memoizer gem instead. It works in all past and future Railses and has none of the annoying "features" of ActiveSupport::Memoizable. It just does memoization and does it well.

The syntax is similiar also:

class Foo
  include M...

• Rack has a limit for how many form parameters it will parse.
• This limit is 65536 by default.
• There is a bug in Rack that will incorrectly count the number of input fields in nested forms. In my case a form with 1326 input fields was enough to break the default limit.
• If Rack thinks your request is too large, the request will fail with a low-level Ruby message like Fix: "undefined method `bytesize' for #" or the standard Rails error box.
• You ...

I posted a solution which is awesome and also does natural sorting.

Sometimes you need to remove high Unicode characters from a string, so all characters have a code point between 0 and 127. The remaining 7-bit-encoded characters ("Low-ASCII") can be transported in most strings where escaping is impossible or would be visually jarrring.

Note that transliteration this will change the string. If you need to preserve the exact string content, you need to use escaping.

Using ActiveSupport

ActiveSupport comes with a `#tran...

Ruby 1.9.2 is very slow when loading files, especially starting Rails servers or running specs takes forever.

Do yourself a favor and upgrade to 1.9.3.

ActiveSupport >= 3 has

Date.parse('2011-02-10').beginning_of_quarter #=> 2011-01-01
Date.parse('2011-02-10').end_of_quarter #=> 2011-03-31

You can manually calculate the quarter index like

(Date.parse('2011-02-10').month / 3.0).ceil #=> 1

Yes, you do actually divide by 3.0, not 4.0.

MySQL has

SELECT QUARTER('2011-02-10'); #=> 1

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...

If you upgrade to the mysql2 gem, you will run into the problem that the server's database.yml (which is usually not under version control) needs to change exactly on deploy.

You can however make your database.yml work for mysql and mysql2 at the same time. Simpy do this

production:
   adapter: <%= defined?(Mysql2) ? 'mysql2' : 'mysql' %>
   #...

Last week saw a security issue with rails 2.3 that required a fix. While an official patch was provided, the 2.3 branch is no longer maintained. So we forked it.

(I'm sure there are already 100 other forks doing absolutely the same, but they are not very easily discoverable.)

To use our fork, change the gem "rails"... line in your Gemfile to this:

gem 'rails', :git => 'https://github.com/makandra/rails.git', :branch => '2-3-fixes'

The intent is to make as few changes to the f...