Michael Schuerig

A presentation I held on May 28 at Düsseldorf on Rails about interesting and useful things you can do with ActiveRecord, SQL, and a smart database. german english .

You’re using git to manage your Ruby on Rails projects? Then you’ve probably come to appreciate topic branches as a kind of transaction facility for programmers. If you need to implement a non-trivial or just try something, the way to go is onto a new “topic” branch. There you can mangle the code all you [...]

Didn’t you always want to write your Rails views as plain Ruby objects? — “What?”, I hear you say. No, I haven’t lost my mind and the idea is quite sensible (or so I hope), once you add the restriction that it is JSON-formatted data that you want to return. Say you need to set [...]

Invariably, in almost every application there happen to be lists of data items that are immutable, just for reference. It could be colors, the four seasons, continents, the states of your country, kinds or types of this and that. These items are almost like constants. As accessible as they are through the ordinary ActiveRecord API, [...]

On a Rails project I’m currently working on I need to fill the database with test data to have something to play with. Apart from large imports, that’s the time when indexes may slow down operation severely instead of speeding things up. Consider: The indexes are not used, but have to be updated again and [...]

The Rails generator script/generate knows pretty well what things it can generate. In fact, it knows much better than I do. So, I think it could really give me some help when I’m typing along on the command line. If you save the snippet below as /etc/bash_completion.d/generate you can enjoy this help, too. _generate() { [...]

I’m not yet so enlightened that all of my Rails unit and functional tests run without accessing the database. Indeed, I’m still using YAML fixtures to populate the database for testing. I also insist on having foreign key constraints in the database, a thing that’s not exactly encouraged by Rails, but which is quite possible [...]

I’ve recently started to add XML support to a Rails application, meaning that the application provides data in XML format, if the request asks for it, and it understands XML data on create or update. To keep the application as well as myself sane, I’ve written a test that ensures the round trip of getting [...]

On my continuing quest to become more Web-2.0-ish, I’ve tried my luck tilting at… well, tag clouds. To get an idea what I’m talking about, please have a look. These are the rudimentary basics to create a tag cloud like that. In the controller def tags @popular_tags = Tag.find_most_popular(:limit => 30) end In the view [...]

It was late last night. And the night before, I admit it. I also admit that I don’t know much about what Web 2.0 is all about, but there are two things that I do know: rounded corners are involved and, of course tags and tag clouds. Tagging is work, therefore ipso facto to be [...]