In Rails 2 I know of a few plugins for enumerations such as acts_as_enumeration and enumerate_by but they don't seem to be maintained or updated for Rails 3. Preferably, the solution would store the enum in memory rather than a database for performance reasons but really any method would be useful since it can always be cached.
I did find enumerated_attribute that claims to work with Rails 3 but quite honestly I don't like the API and was hoping for another good solution.
(Sorry for only linking to the one plugin but it won't let me post more than one link until I get a higher reputation)
I am currently using lwe's simple_enum which seems to be actively developed and stores values on memory or if you prefer on a table.
If you're using DataMapper as your ORM have a look at dm-types which includes an Enum type.
There is this gem, enumerate_it, it has good documentation and very well done!
Related
I just inherited a RoR 3.2 app and am trying to get it working on 4.2
I am going to put on my sarcastic hat for a second, just so I can feel better. Instead of having a single line in a single file to protect specific fields from mass-assignment, "Strong" Parameters requires bloating up controllers and heaven help you if a controller uses multiple models or a model is used by multiple controllers or need nested attribute whitelisting. This is the exact opposite of DRY and KISS.
That is better. Okay, so the question is, besides getting rid of mass assignment completely, which is sounding really good right about now, is there a sane way to use it or get around it. From what I understand that gem that brings back attr_accessible won't work in Rails 5 which is where this app is heading.
I understand the Ruby object model and can make a ton of modules that controllers can mixin, but that is just ugly and still error prone.
Any advice or hints would be welcome.
Why is that every new Rails feature involves more boilerplate spread over multiple files? If I wanted Java, I know where to find it. The stupidity of getting rid of the powerful and clean link_to_function in favor of using a tangled mess of callbacks almost made me quit, but adding that function back is trivial. Hopefully when the client wants the inevitable upgrade to Rails 5 I can talk him into something more sane and move things bit by bit to a sane web framework.
What you're after is "form objects". There's a great railscast episode on them. You may also be interested in the reform gem
Edit: looks like there's a free version of that railscast episode on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvL_aZt3zyU
I've read through https://github.com/apotonick/roar and it seems like a lot of thought has been put into ROAR. But in the context of a fairly standard Rails-powered JSON API that uses jbuilder, I'm still not able to immediately see what benefits ROAR provides.
What am I missing?
Within a Rails project, you should do as much as possible to stick with the built-in solution, but outside a choice is mandatory. Personally one aspect that I love about ROAR is the versioning for the API.
There is one good post I like that might help you:
http://devblog.reverb.com/post/47197560134/hal-siren-rabl-roar-garner-building-hypermedia
It might not be an straight answer, but it explains the problems you should be aware of when choosing a JSON API generator.
I know that Rails has some tools on board to create a REST API. However, concepts like HATEOS aren't supported out of the box.
I googled around for Gems that are filling the gap. The most complete Gem I found is Restfulie (https://github.com/caelum/restfulie). But I am not complete convinced about Restfulie and the project looks abandoned. Hence, I am looking for good alternatives to Restfulie.
What's the best Gem to create a REST API for Rails?
Popular choices are RABL and Roar / roar-rails.
I personally like Roar better because it allows you to consume your representations which is a bit harder with RABL. On the other hand, it's concepts are still in flux so things still tend to change.
Grape is worth a try.
I am looking at a rails app and at the top of every controller there is a block of code that looks something like this
expose(:var) {Model.find params[:var_id]}
I understand what is inside the block just fine but...
I cannot find any documentation on what the expose function does where it comes from or anything I have tried searching the project and using the searchable rails docs.
I would love to know what it does, can someone please tell me or point me to the docs.
This is probably referencing the decent_exposure gem. You can learn more about it here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/259-decent-exposure
Source: https://github.com/voxdolo/decent_exposure
It's a method from the Decent Exposure gem. You can check out a screencast that Ryan Bates did on it over at Railscasts. It's a really great gem. I use it in my application. It cuts down on a lot of the redundancy in the controller layer.
expose is not a part of Rails, it comes from the decent_exposure gem.
It is not an answer to the question. I just want to make the Rails world a bit better and I hope that somebody will read this.
Please think twice before using expose. You should only use it if you 100% sure you are using it the right way and it really makes the code better. Read the documentation properly!
One of projects I worked on became unmaintainable because of tons of expose in controllers which replaced not only all #instance_variables passed to views, but also a lot of business logic and the most helper methods.
When you use expose it is not clear in which controller actions and in which views it is used. Unexperienced developers combine data and logic for multiple actions and multiple views in the same expose block.
That's a nightmare.
Believe me, expose really destroys projects if not used properly.
I’m evaluating full text search methods for Rails 3 ATM. Does anyone here have a recommendation? Seems to me as if most of the known methods (Sunspot, Sphinx, Ferret, Xapian) aren’t yet ready for Rails 3. Is that so? At the moment I’ve got plenty of resources left on the machine were I’d like to deploy my app but nevertheless, I’d like to keep the idle load for the search engine as low as possible. I’m planning to use PostgreSQL if that’s of any relevance here.
After some reading I’m almost sure that I’d like to use Sunspot or Xapian. But if there’s any other (and better) solution please tell me :-) Especially regarding Sunspot I’m not sure if it was clever to have a complete Tomcat running in addition to my Rails app. Anyone has experience with this constellation?
Thanks in advance,
Ulf
If you are using PostgreSQL you can get an awful lot out of its built-in text search capabilities before you need to reach for external libraries. I've been using tsearch queries for years with excellent results.
PostgreSQL full text search analyses word proximity to calculate Relevance & ranking and offers useful features like highlighting of search results.
It is also aware of language specific normalisation rules, for example it knows to ignore the s and es pluralization suffixes in English; so searches for 'country' will also bring back highlighted results for 'countries', much the same way that Google does.
I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't use the libraries that you've mentioned, but it is worth investigating the database to see if will already fulfil the majority, if not all of your requirements.
You can use sunspot with Rails3, no problem. We have done so successfully using the sunspot/sunspot_rails gems (1.2.rc4). And it's not too much of a hassle to run Solr within a Tomcat server.
For fulltext-search features you should use a search engine.
For example you could use the Lucene Library with jRuby.
If you like to stay with standard Ruby (cRuby) you coud use Solr.
For rails there are also some Solr plugins:
For example starting with http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolRuby could be a good idea.
Sunspot is Rails3 ready, we're using it on a few Rails3 apps already. I've had a lot of success with Solr and Sunspot. So much that we're starting a blog series on it