Kelly Felkins's blog
Ask for Help
"What do you recommend for Devise user invitations?"
Interesting Things
- Did you know that Rubymine can search files found with a previous search? Do cmd-shift-f and do a search. Do cmd-shift-f again. In the dialog, select 'custom'. In the drop down list is 'Files in Previous Search Result'
- Former Pivot Alex Chaffee is teaching a javascript class, and there are still a few openings.
Ask for Help
"Anyone using Selenium 2 and Webdriver?"
One of our internal projects is using it.
"How to stop time in Jasmine?"
There were a couple suggestions:
- use a global function, such as 'now'
- send in your own clock object
"Whurl standalone, or more dynos?"
Apparently Whurl is running on a single dyno at Heroku, so a single bad request can tie up Whurl until the request times out. Where are you TildeWill?
"What's this called?"
Imagin these are records in a relational database, with the records on the left having a one to many relationship with the records on the right. How would you google this?
Interesting Things
- IE doesn't allow you to change the type of an input. If you create an input with createElement, IE will not allow you to change that element to a button. This was discovered when a project's javascript dom builder code was modified to generate inputs of type=button rather than type=submit. The cross-browser solution was to create some other temporary dom element such as a div and then set the innerHtml of that element to a type=button input, then extract that child element and return it in the builder call. Yeah!
Ask for Help
"What's the best way to get gems for forked repos?"
There was quite a discussion on this. The specific issue is that the team is trying to use Compass (Chris Eppstein gave a talk on Compass at Pivotal on 3/18-look for the future video on our Talks Page.) For the moment, since compass depends on the edge version of sass you must first manually install sass before installing the compass gem.
- One suggestion was to submit a fix for the gem. This is not a good solution in this case since the new version of sass/haml is expected to be released soon, fixing compass and simplifying its installation.
- Pivotal will likely host its own internal gem server at some point to deal with issues like this.
- The Has My Gem Built Yet? service might be useful in some situations, but not for this specific problem.
Interesting Things
- Branches + JsUnit + CI + IE = :-( : Apparently it is difficult to manage IE's cache in CI. One project apparently has a bat file on CI that clears the cache every 30 minutes. Another team solved this by making the cache directory read only. Often browser/OS combinations have some technique for disabling caching.
- Test Swarm Alpha: this is a crowd sourced javascript testing solution (think seti@home for javascript testing) being developed by John Resig.
Ask for Help
"AR attribute appears to be skipped by text field helper?!" Apparently the model method is bypassed by the text field helper if a column of the same name is present in the underlying table. This was experienced in Rails 2.2.
Others have apparently experienced this in the past but a clear answer did not surface.
Interesting Things
- Browser History with Javascript and Page Based Json: One of our projects solved the vexing problem of browser history for a page that has initial page provided json with subsequent ajax updates. A simple page back operation will display the originally downloaded data, not the updated data. The solution is to add a unique id for each page, and store these ids in a cookie. When an ajax request updates the page it removes its page id from the cookie. When you use the back button, each page checks to see if its unique id is in the cookie, and if it is not, it forces a reload.
Really Simple History was mentioned as another way to manage javascript/ajax history. - Rubymine Build 784 has the Weirdest. Bug. Ever.: This may only be a problem if you work on a mac and you need to enter capital letters in rubymine dialogs like find and replace ;-). Many of us are fans of intellij/rubymine, but we wish they had a better test process. To be fair, rubymine is in public preview, so expect the occasional bug or two.