Submit a form with Prototype

For example, to send a form and populate a preview div with the response.

$('content_form').request({
  parameters: { 'preview': "1" }, // overrides parameters
  onComplete: function(transport){ 
    $('previewContent').update(transport.responseText); 
  }
});

Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes | Free PeepCode Blog

The Rails router has been written and rewritten at least four times2, including a recent rewrite for the upcoming Rails 3. The syntax is now more concise.<br />
<br />
But never mind making it shorter! It’s time for a final rewrite: Let’s get rid of it altogether!

stefankroes's ancestry at master - GitHub

Ancestry is a gem/plugin that allows the records of a Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord model to be organised as a tree structure (or hierarchy). It uses a single, intuitively formatted database column, using a variation on the materialised path pattern. It exposes all the standard tree structure relations (ancestors, parent, root, children, siblings, descendants) and all of them can be fetched in a single sql query. Additional features are STI support, named_scopes, depth caching, depth constraints, easy migration from older plugins/gems, integrit...

Load all models into an Array

Dir.glob(File.join RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'models', '*.rb').collect{ |path| path[/.+\/(.+).rb/,1] }.collect(&:camelize).collect(&:constantize)

Rails - Multi Language with Fast_Gettext

  • sudo gem install gettext --no-ri --no-rdoc
  • sudo gem install fast_gettext --no-ri --no-rdoc
  • script/plugin install git://github.com/grosser/gettext_i18n_rails.git (didn't work as gem)
  • environment.rb: see code example at the bottom
  • if this is your first translation: cp locale/app.pot locale/de/app.po for every locale you want to use
  • use method "_" like _('text') in your rails code
  • run rake gettext:find to let GetText find all translations used
  • translate messages in 'locale/de/app.po' (leave msgstr blank and ms...

Automatically build sprites with Lemonade

How it works

See the lemonade descriptions.

Unfortunately, the gem has a few problems:

  • it does not work with Sass2
  • it always generates all sprites when the sass file changes, which is too slow for big projects
  • it expects a folder structure quite different to our usual

All these problems are solved for us, in our own lemonade fork. This fork has since been merged to the original gem, maybe we can use t...

Freeze (vendor, unpack) a single Ruby gem with and without Bundler

When you need to patch an existing gem, one way is to "vendor" the gem by copying it into the vendor/gems directory of your Rails project. You can then make any changes you require and Rails will use the vendored version of the gem after a server restart. Unfortunately you need to perform some additional steps to marry Rails and the copied gem. This notes describes what to do.

With Bundler

This is super-painful. If you just copy the gem to vendor/gems, Rails will complain:

Unpacked gem foolib in vendor/gems has no s...

Clear a Solr index with acts_as_solr

ActsAsSolr::Post.execute(Solr::Request::Delete.new(:query => "#{Location.solr_configuration[:type_field]}:#{ModelClass}"))
ActsAsSolr::Post.execute(Solr::Request::Commit.new)

Fixing "A copy of Klass has been removed from the module tree but is still active"

This can happen during development when classes without automatic reloading are pointing to classes with automatic reloading. E.g. some class in lib is calling Model.static_method.

Workaround A

Stop referencing autoloaded classes from static files. If you can't, see workaround B and C.

Workaround B

Make sure the offending file (the one referencing the autoloaded class) is autoloaded, too. You may do this:

# config/application.rb

  config.paths.add 'offending/file/parent/directory', eager_load: true

Workaroun...

Configuring Git with .gitconfig

Basic configuration

Please keep this config simple. It should be a starting point for new developers learning Git.

[user]
  name = Your Name
  email = your.name@domain.com

[branch]
  sort = -committerdate
[color]
   ui = auto
[color "branch"]
  current = yellow reverse
  local = yellow
  remote = green
[color "diff"]
  whitespace = white reverse
  meta = blue reverse
  frag = blue reverse
  old = red
  new = green
[color "status"]
  added = green
  changed = yellow
  untracked = cyan
[interactive]
  singlekey = true # Do not requir...

Slugs with FriendlyId

Gem to provide nice looking urls ("/blog/the-greatest-bug-i-never-fixed"). If you don't need anything too special (like i18n for the urls) it works as a drop-in-replacement. It basically overwrites #to_param to return the slug, and .find to search by the slug.

Make sure, everywhere you build paths, you use model_path(:id => model) instead of model_path(:id => model.id). You also need to adapt all code using something like .find_by_id. The regular .find is fine.

See the github README for installation instructions.

Don't forget ...

GNU httptunnel

httptunnel creates a bidirectional virtual data connection tunnelled in HTTP requests. The HTTP requests can be sent via an HTTP proxy if so desired.

Ruby, Rails, Web2.0 » Blog Archive » Great Ruby on Rails REST resources

I have been playing around with RESTful Rails recently. Below is my collection or Rails REST howtos, tutorials and other resources I have found so far.

Bill de hÓra: "Just" use POST

PUT means update the resource with this entity, which tends means "overwrite". Now think for a moment about how that works for things like tags in a blog post - if I leave the tag out, am I saying remove it? Ignore it? Do I have to echo back all the data so it doesn't get scrubbed?

mca blog [de hÓra: "Just" Use Post]

Once you start introducing partial updates, you open yourself for caching problems. doing partial updates means all cached copies of the original resource are now invalid.

mca blog [REST Upside Down]

i keep looking for ways to help people 'get' REST. not URLs or HTTP Methods; but REST itself - in a nutshell. so here's a new angle i've started playing with: "REST Upside Down."

Ruby on Rails » Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date » Pathfinder Development

There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.

Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender.

SourceForge.net: SWFRIP: Files

SWFRIP is a Macromedia Flash resource extractor and editor. It can save resources in various formats, including SVG conversion from the flash vector format, decompile ActionScript, and remove the protect tag from SWF files.

PragDave: The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient

So, as a result, people using RESTful ideas to talk to browsers have to put the smarts back on the server. They invent new URLs which (for example) return a resource, but return it all wrapped up in the HTML needed to display it as a form for browser-based editing.

paperplanes. run_later Gets Some Rails 2.3 Middleware Love

In earlier version I needed to do an awkward thing that only affected development mode, where Rails unloads all classes after each request. run_later runs code in a separate thread, and depending on how long that code runs the classes would be unloaded when they're still accessed from the worker.

ModPorter - Painless file uploads

Porter is essentially the inverse of X-SendFile. It parses the multipart post in C inside your apache process and writes the files to disk. Once that work is done it changes the request to look like a regular form POST which contains pointers to the temp files on disk.

rest-discuss : Message: Re: [rest-discuss] REST, HTTP, Sessions and Cookies

Most of the problems with cookies are due to breaking visibility,