Tag Archives: coding

Recently, I encountered a bug in ActiveRecord’s AssociationCollection. When you push a new record into an associated collection, the collection in memory is always appended to, even if :uniq is set for the association. This causes a discrepancy in such a collection’s contents until a reload from the database removes the duplicates. While waiting for feedback on the patch I submitted, I wanted to fix the problem in my application. Now, I could have just redefined the AssociationCollection class during my app’s initialization, but that wouldn’t be very interesting. Since Rails associations are full of strange and wonderful magic, this posed a fun little coding exercise for a Saturday morning.
Read the rest of this post

So, if you haven’t heard, Rails 2.1 was released yesterday, And it comes chock full of time zoney goodness. But wait, don’t run off and enable time zone support in your app without reading this first!
Read the rest of this post

If your Rails application’s primary users are on your company’s intranet, and you host your app using mongrel_cluster and Apache’s mod_proxy_balancer or something similar, you may have noticed a potentially unwanted side effect: users who cause exceptions in your application will get a stack trace instead of your configured error page, even when running in production mode. This is a good excuse to peek into the Rails internals and explain how Rails determines what page to display when it encounters an error.
Read the rest of this post

A central source for user authentication is a worthwhile thing for a company to have. Unfortunately, for much of the corporate world, this means Microsoft Active Directory. Hey, it’s not all bad. At least Ruby applications can access Active Directory with the ruby-net-ldap gem. Still, code in a Rails application which has to deal with LDAP attributes can look downright foreign next to all of your nifty English-looking attribute names, and ActiveLdap, while very cool, is overkill for simple tasks. Sometimes you just want a simple way to get at a few key attributes about your users once they log in. Maybe you’re looking to cache that info in a local database table so that you can enforce database integrity checks, for instance? Here’s a single file you can just drop into your Rails (or plain old Ruby) project and use any way you see fit.
Read the rest of this post