Help

How do I test a custom will_paginate renderer?

If using RSpec, test the custom render in a helper spec by using helper.will_paginate and the options you need to test your rendering settings.

When testing with Devise, my custom Devise views are not loading in the specs, instead Devise’s default views are. Why?

Interesting Things

• When using Devise in integration test, users were logged in when they shouldn’t have been. The culprit was that in the integration test there was before block that logged a user in and in the same scope a pending test. The logged in user was never officially logged in, so later in the test suite a view that did not require login had a logged in user. Be careful how you log in users and clean your session!

Helps

“Showing multiple errors on a field in Rails?”

Often you’ll have multiple validations on a field, for example, ensuring a date is present and also that it is in the right range. If you don’t want to just render the array of errors, one way to go is to create fancier errors using custom validators that will be easier to parse and play with in your view than a bunch of concatenated strings.

“Cross browser testing in the cloud?”

A pivot (who will remain unnamed) wishes to view a webpage on various browser configurations, for example, IE6, in the “cloud.” Pivotal humans suggest Browser Shots.

Interesting Things

“Careful with your command line…”

Careful with your usage of commands like
find . -type f | xargs your_favorite_command
in projects with a git repo. Pretty sure you (I) didn’t mean to do a global search replace inside of the
.git/
directory.

Ask for Help

“How do I show the 80 character line guide in RubyMine?”

Search your RM preferences, it’s in there.

Interesting Things

• Autosave doesn’t work when you have a has_many :through relationship in your model. The POST gets rewritten as a PUT and doesn’t work as expected. See an example here.

• Got multiple log files? Want to join those log entries across a specific request? LumberJack is for you! It adds metadata to each log – things like:

  • severity – The severity recorded for the message.
  • time – The time at which the message was recorded.
  • program name – The name of the program logging the message. This can be either set for all messages or customized with each message.
  • process id – The process id (pid) of the process that logged the message.
  • unit of work id – The unique 12 byte hexadecimal number generated for a unit of work.

And we’re only a few days behind! We’ll start it out with some helps on browser integration tests (everyone’s favorite topic).

Helps

“jQuery drag and drop browser integration test?”

There is a
drag_to
method which may be useful.

“jQuery file uploader bowser integration test?”

The jQuery file uploader seems to be so clever that a Pivot was having trouble testing it with Selenium. Suggestions?

Interesting Things

“will_not_paginate”

Kamanari is a new awesome-er pagination doohickey for Rails 3. Apparently it is making developers’ lives more awesome especially in regards to Ajax-y type things. Check it out!

“HTML is the new assembly”

Knowlesdog mentioned Slim as your new Haml alternative. For some reasons why it’s awesome, check out the github page linked above.

Ask for Help

“window.onhashchange doesn’t work in Android’s version of WebKit?”

The event exists, but it doesn’t ever get fired. Apparently this also happens in Mobile Safari. Does anyone know how to get it to work?

“What’s the latest and greatest replacement for acts_as_list?”

Apparently there’s no fabulous replacement for acts_as_list.

Interesting Things

• Apigee to-go will make an API console for your site.
• Ruby Gems 1.6.1 is out.

Ask for Help

“‘Teamcity formatter missing’ error?”

Any ideas how to work around a “Teamcity formatter error” message when running specs (using RSpec 2) in RubyMine?

” Paperclip breaks when a filename contains a ‘#’ character”

Apparently this has been fixed but not released?

Interesting Things

• Selenium Conference is taking place in San Francisco on April 4-6.

• MongoDB apparently stores pre-epoch dates as far-future dates and converts them back from future to past dates automatically. However, it does not convert them when searching or sorting.

Ask for Help

“Is there a way to have multiple ssh.config files or include other ssh type configurations in your main ssh.config?”

Still searching for an answer here.

“What’s the best way to share cap recipes across multiple internal git repos?”

Git submodules will work, but also think about using a shared gem. The shared gem approach will enable you to keep your server configuration in one place as opposed to scattered across multiple repos that define their own server list.

Interesting Things

• Newer versions of RubyGems (v1.6 was explicitly mentioned) and Rails 2.3 are not compatible right out of the box. You can drop a block in to your environment.rb file to get around it

• Love your Lorum Ipsum generator, but you need English words? Take a look at Fillerati wich will let you create some paragraphs from books in the public domain.

Ask for Help

“Has anyone else had their Selenium tests break after upgrading from rails 2.3.8 to 2.3.11?”

One team was using Rack 1.1.0, Mongrel 1.1.5 and Rails 2.3.8. When they upgraded to Rails 2.3.11, their Selenium tests started failing. After some investigation they found this commit which they used to create a monkeypatch for Rack 1.1.0:

# Back-porting this patch: https://github.com/rack/rack/commit/f6f3c60938ea3b08f3292a2480e6753c293584e5
module Rack
  module Utils
    class HeaderHash < Hash
      def [](k)
        super(@names[k]) if @names[k]
        super(@names[k.downcase])
      end
    end
  end
end

Anyone have a better solution?

“Slower test suite with Spork?”

Spork can speed up the start-up time of your test suite, but has anyone seen it slow down the overall test run? One Pivot was seeing a 10% slowdown in overall suite speed.

Interesting Things

• Postgres can write a lot of stuff to your logs. You can quiet it down with the silent-postgres gem and by adding min_messages to database.yml
• RubyMine 3.1 has support for Spork!

Ask for Help

“jQuery throwing a syntax error when using is("[data-foo]")?”

Has anyone seen jQuery throw a syntax error when passing a data- attribute name to the is() function? This code often works, but started throwing a syntax error after some markup was removed and then re-inserted into the DOM:

$("#foo").attr("data-bar") = 5;
$("#foo").is("[data-bar]");

Interesting Things

• Rails 3.0.5 has been released.
• The Nordic Ruby Conference call for proposals ends today, so hurry up and submit.
• Rails Conf 2011, which is being held in my hometown of Bal-ti-more, just announced its keynote speakers. Check them out.