Ruby On Rails is Web Development That Doesn't hurt. It abstracts a lot of housekeeping stuff away from you, which is cool

Rails Things I always forget

Selecting an option in a select (aka popup) control

The third parameter for the select_tag must match the first item (aka: the value item) in the options. AKA with an option of [1, "Shipped"], the third item must be one and not the string 1. Use to_i if you're unsure!

Things I hate about Rails/Ruby

* Too easy to get Date, Time, and DateTime confused, with disastrous results

•       d = DateTime.now
        d + 3.days
        puts d # will be something like "2718-12-22T17:04:29-04:00"
     

  now you've screwed the pooch and sent d WAAY into the future. Oops. Better to do:

     d = DateTime.now
     d.to_time + 3.days
     puts d #will be something like "Sat Apr 25 17:05:26 -0400 2009"
    

  #to_time works on Times and Dates too -- so this way it won't better what you've been given, just call #to_time on it and add n.UNITS

Language Work-Arounds Provided By Rails

• HashWithIndifferentAccess (aka: don't care if you pass a Symbol or a String, it'll return the same key)

Rails Configuration Information

Targetting MacPorts MySQL via sudo gem install mysql:

$ sudo gem install mysql --  --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin//mysql_config5

Unpacking Gems Into the vendor/ directory

See Autoloading Gems In Vendor. The comments on this blog entry also points to Dr. Nic's Gems On Rails plugin

Err The Blog explains why this is important

Neat Things Added Since Rails 1.2.3

Named Scopes for models. See The blog article introducing this

Example:

#in the Person model...
  named_score :women, :conditions => {:sex => "F"}

# now, in the wild...

all_women_in_system = Person.women

Rails Hacks

Dealing with a ton of migrations

Use schema.rb as migration 1

David Bock says: A common usage of the schema.rb is to handle the collapse of a huge number of migrations. For instance:

I have worked on a rails project that grew to over 120 migrations over the course of two years. Building the db from scratch took a long time, and a lot of that time was spent adding columns that were no longer used, removing columns, transforming data, etc.

We were able to run this stuff at a known release of the software, then take the generated schema.rb file, remove all the migrations up until that point, and make the schema.rb file the new migration #1.

That meant we couldn't roll back past that point without checking out earlier versions of the software, but that was well worth the reduction in complexity.

The RailsKits project do something similar - when you buy a RailsKit, you are buying a partial implementation. You don't care about their migration history, you only need to know the db up until that point. So their first migration is their schema.rb file.

Rails On Windows

Loading a big SQL dump into MYSQL

PHPMySQL likes to time out on big documents. BUT you CAN use mysql directly in InstantRails.

But it's Windows, so you can't use the normal trick of mysql -u root < FILE_TO_IMPORT (no redirect operators)

So if you open a console in InstantRails, you can do

 mysql -u root

then use the proper database. THEN

mysql > source FILE_TO_IMPORT

Which will load the file

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