Icebergist

I’ve been planning to catchup with all the new Rails 3 stuff. To get me started I’ve compiled a small Rails 3 related reading list.

1. Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Notes
2. Active Record Query Interface 3.0
3. The Skinny on Scopes (Formerly named_scope)
4. Rails 3 Beautiful Code
5. Railscasts – rails-3.0 episodes
6. jQuery with Rails 3
7. The Rails Module (in Rails 3)

Once I’m done with it I plan to get even more from:

• Rails 3 Resources
• Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going

I have been working on extending Rails’ I18n Simple backend to make it work with Serbian grammar (post on that will follow soon), but I kept getting an error:

Expected ./lib/serbian_simple.rb to define SerbianSimple (LoadError)

I’ve just spent an hour trying to figure out why this keeps happening and I found that there’s a lot of people with similar problem.

It seems that the problem appears when Rails tries to autoload files. In my case there was a simple solution – I just added require ’serbian_simple.rb’ in environment.rb to manually load the file.

Most of my clients prefer to have a separate admin section. In turn, I like to have separate controllers for admin section and front-end in my Rails app. This is not as straightforward as it might seem, especially if you like to use scaffolding for admin controller.

The goal is to get 2 separate RESTful controllers, admin & front-end controller, one model and for admin pages to have scaffolding.

Here is the easiest way I found so far to accomplish this. This example generates categories model and controllers for it.

./script/generate controller admin/categories
./script/generate scaffold category name:string

This will generate an empty controller in admin namespace and a scaffolded resource for front-end controller.

Now we have everything generated we just need to make it work with admin controller and not with front-end.

• move all templates from app/views/categories to app/views/admin/categories
• copy all functions from categories_controller.rb to admin/categories_controller.rb
• add namespace for admin controller in routes.rb:map.namespace :admin do |admin|
admin.resources :categories
end
• in admin/categories_controller.rb replace in 3 places redirect_to calls to work with admin namespace. It will have something like redirect_to(@category), but to work with namespace it needs to have redirect_to([:admin, @category])
• make similar changes in all templates, i.e. make it work within an admin namespace. You need to make following changes:
  • form_for(@category) => form_for([:admin, @category])
  • <%= link_to ‘Show’, @category %> => <%= link_to ‘Show’, [:admin, @category] %>
  • categories_path => admin_categories_path
  • edit_category_path(@category) => edit_admin_category_path(@category)
  • new_category_path => new_admin_category_path

That’s it. Now you’ll have /admin/categories for all administrative tasks and you have a free controller for front-end actions.

You might wonder why not just generate scaffold for admin/categories… The reason is that you’ll also get a model that is namespaced in admin (i.e. model would be Admin::Category). Scaffolded views also wouldn’t work as it seems that generator doesn’t take into account the fact that you are using a namespace.

Mosso’s hosting cloud at $100 / month seems like a good solution to get a scalable server. However one thing bugs me, actually two things…

First one: they offer FTP only access. Meaning you cannot deploy sites directly from code repositories (i.e. git or svn). That sucks.

Second thing that bugs me: for $100 you get quite a lot of computing power which can be used to run multiple sites – but you are only allowed to have one Rails app running. Only one. If you want additional Rails apps (for example to have a test server) you need to pay an extra fee.

I know it’s cloud computing and that you have to be able to run it with any additional configuration (that’s why I think it’s ok that you have to freeze your gems in Rails apps, because you cannot install any gems yourself)… but not being able to checkout my code from repository and having to upload the whole app each time you make changes is really annoying.

In their defense, the support guy said that they are working on it, but he could give me an ETA when they’ll allow something like that.

One thing that always annoyed me when rendering collection partials is that a local var in partial is named same as a partial template name. So, to go around this I always created another local variable in partial and gave it a more meaningful name.

No longer… As the Ryan says from now on in the Edge Rails you can specify the name of the local variable in which each collection element will be exposed within a partial. You will can do this:

render :partial => 'employees', :collection => @workers, :as => :person

It’s a simple thing, but it’s just one of the things that bugged me. I am glad it’s gone now.