When an object is created / updated, various callbacks are executed in this order:

before_validation
after_validation
before_save
around_save
before_create
around_create
after_create
after_save
after_commit / after_rollback

Thus, each of these callbacks is executed at a specific time in the life cycle of the object. This is important because this point in time determ...

TLDR

if you define a equality method for a class you must also implement def hash.

Ruby has a lot of methods that have to do something with equality, like ==, ===, eql?, equal?. This card should help you differentiate between those and give you hints on how to implement your own equality methods in a safe manner.

Differences between the methods

for everyday use: ==

When you compare two objects in ruby, you most often see the use of foo == bar. By default the == operator inherits from Object and is impl...

The cards editor has a feature "Cite other card" to create links to other cards in the same deck as mardown links.
If you want to reference a card from a different deck, this bookmarklet might be useful:

javascript:(function () {
  const doAlert = () => { alert("Maybe not a makandra card?") };
  let cardsPathPattern = /(\/[\w-]+\/\d+)-.+/;
  if (window.location.pathname.match(cardsPathPattern)) {
    let currentPath = window.location.pathname.match(cardsPathPattern)[1];
    let title = document.querySelector('h1.note--title')?.textCon...

tl;dr

You should decouple migrations from models by embedding models into the migration. To use STI in this scenario you have to overwrite find_sti_class and sti_name.

Tip

When possible, try to avoid STI in migrations by disabling it.

Example

Warning

This is more for the sake of I want to do it but I kno...

Jasmine specs for the frontend often need some DOM elements to work with. Because creating them is such a common task, we should have an efficient way to do it.

Let's say I need this HTML structure:

<ul type="square">
  <li>item 1</li>
  <li>item 2</li>
</ul>

This card compares various approaches to fabricating DOM elements for testing.

Constructing individual elements

While you can use standard DOM functions to individually create and append elements, this is extremely verbose:

let list = document.createElement('...

Variable fonts are popular for two reasons: they expand design possibilities and improve website performance. While the former statement is definitely true since variable fonts do provide infinite typographical choices, the latter only holds under certain conditions.

tl;dr

The Chrome DevTools are a neat collection of tools for the daily work as a web developer. If you're lucky, you'll maybe find some handy stuff in here.

Analysing

• Frontend Performance Issues
• Rendering Performace

Breakpoints

• [Breakpoints on HTML Elements](https://makandracards.com/makandra/517982-chrome-devtools...

Background:

ActiveType::Object inherits from ActiveRecod::Base and is designed to behave like an ActiveRecord Object, just without the database persistence.

Don't remove any of the default behavior of the initialize method!

If you have a class which inherits from ActiveType::Object and you need to override the #initialize method, then you should be really careful:

• Always pass exactly one attribute. ActiveRecod::Base objects really want to get their arguments processable as keyword arguments. Don't change the syntax, or y...

The problem

Unpoly's [up-observe], [up-autosubmit] and [up-validate] as well as their programmatic variants up.observe() and up.autosubmit() are a nightmare for integration tests.

Tests are usually much faster than the configured up.form.config.observeDelay. Therefore, it may happen that you already entered something into the next field before unpoly updates that field with a server response, discarding your changes.

The steps I wait for active ajax requests to complete (if configured) and capybara-lockstep can catch some ...

tl;dr

Since Rails 7+ you can use ComparisonValidator for validations like greater_than, less_than, etc. on dates, numerics or strings.

Example

We have a model for booking a trip. This model has mandatory attributes to enforce dates for the start and the end.

# == Schema Information
#
# start_date :date
# end_date   :date
# ...

class TripBooking < ApplicationRecord
  validates :start_date, presence: true
  validates :end_date, presence: true
end

These validations are enough. We also want to ensure, th...

Here are a few common patterns that will probably lead to flaky specs. If you notice them in your specs, please make sure that you have not introduced a flaky spec.

Using RSpec matchers

One rule of thumb I try to follow in capybara tests is using capybara matchers and not plain rspec matchers.

One example:

visit(some_page)
text_field = find('.textfield')
expect(text_field['value']).to match /pattern/

This can work, but is too brittle and flaky. match will not retry or synchronize the value of text_field.

The equivale...

Case studies and experiments demonstrating the impact of web performance optimization (WPO) on user experience and business metrics.

To allow HTTP 304 responses, Rails offers the fresh_when method for controllers.

The most common way is to pass an ActiveRecord instance or scope, and fresh_when will set fitting E-Tag and Last-Modified headers for you. For scopes, an extra query is sent to the database.

fresh_when @users

If you do not want that magic to happen, e.g. because your scope is expens...

For Rails models where only one of multiple attributes may be filled out at the same time, there is no built-in validation.

I've seen different solutions in the wild, each with different downsides:

• Private method referenced via validate: works, but is barely portable and clutters the model.
• Multiple presence validations with "if other is blank" each: looks pretty, but is incorrect as it allows both values to be filled in; also the error messages for a blank record are misleading.

Here is a third option: Write a custom validator to ...

Greg Molnar has written a neat article about creating a single-file Rails app.
This is not meant for production use but can be useful to try things out, e.g. when hunting down a bug or embedding a Rails app into the tests of a gem.

What you do is basically:

1. Put everything (gems, application config, database migrations, models, controllers) into a single .ru file, like app.ru.
2. Run it via rackup app.ru. (Hint: if your file is called config.ru, you can just run `rac...

When working with feature branches, stale branches pile up over time. It's best to remove them right after merge, locally and on the remote, but it is a little tedious: you need to remember it, and perform the few steps manually each time.

Enter Git hooks. The folks at Liquid Light have built a little post-merge hook that will delete a feature branch on confirmation....

Recently we detected a memory leak in one of our applications. Hunting it down, we found that the memory leak was located in Rails' #prepend_view_path. It occurs when the instance method prepend_view_path is called in each request, which is a common thing in a multi-tenant application.

On top of leaking memory, it also causes a performance hit, since templates rendered using the prepended view path will not be cached and compiled anew on each request.

This is not a new memory leak. It was [first reported in in 2014](https://github.com/...

The linked content includes a few design patterns implemented with Ruby on Rails.

What is the card indented to achieve?

• You can use the pattern names for code reviews, so all parties know with only a few words which change is requested. Example: "Please use a form object here"
• You can learn about new code patterns
• You should read the sections "Advantages of using design patterns" and "Disadvantages of using design patterns in a wrong way", since design patterns do not replace good code

Included Design Patterns: Service, Value objec...

SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('some-database'));

Example

SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('cards_p'));
----------------
 13 GB
(1 row)

SELECT pg_database_size('cards_p');
 pg_database_size 
------------------
      13524832927
(1 row)

Related

• PostgreSQL: Show size of all databases
• PostgreSQL: How to show table sizes

When paginating records, we usually need to know the number of total records in order to render pagination links. Popular pagination libraries like will_paginate or Kaminari do this for us by simply issuing an extra query, like this:

SELECT post.* FROM posts LIMIT 20 OFFSET 100;

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM posts;   

This is fine most of the time. But rarely, you might have very complicated WHERE conditions or a subquery that takes time to run. In thes...

I recently wanted to add a model for address information but also wanted to add a unique index to those fields that is case-insensitive.
The model looked like this:

create_table :shop_locations do |t|
  t.string :street
  t.string :house_number
  t.string :zip_code
  t.string :city
  t.belongs_to :shop
end

But how to solve the uniqueness problem?

Another day, another undocumented Rails feature!

This time, it’s that ActiveRecord::Base.connection.add_index supports an undocumented option to pass a string argument as the v...

Imagine these models and associations:

class Deck < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :cards
end

class Card < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :deck, optional: true
end

Now you want to find all Decks without any Card or all Cards without a Deck.

Rails 6.1+

Rails 6.1 introduced a handy method ActiveRecord#missing to find records without given associations.

Deck.where.missing(:cards)

SELECT "decks".*
FROM "dec...

It might sometimes be useful to check whether your Rails application accesses the file system unnecessarily, for example if your file system access is slow because it goes over the network.

The culprit might be a library like carrierwave that checks file existence or modification times, whereas your application could determine all this from your database.

Introducing strace

One option it to use strace for this, which logs all system calls performed by a process.

To do this, start your rails server using something like

DISA...

Testing file download links in an end-to-end test can be painful, especially with Selenium.

The attached download_helpers.rb provides a download_link method for your Capybara tests. It returns a hash describing the download's response:

details = download_link('Download report')
details[:disposition]  # => 'attachment' or 'inline'
details[:filename]     # => 'report.txt'
details[:text]         # => file content as string
details[:content_type] # => 'text/plain'

Features

Compared to [other approaches](...