If you follow me on Twitter or have been following the rails core mailing list lately, you might have seen mention of the MetaWhere rewrite I’ve been working on. If you haven’t, let me start by linking you to the rewrite branch on GitHub. This is just a quick post explaining why I’m rewriting it, and why you should care.
No, I don't work in NYC, DC, or the valley, and I'm cool with that.
Tag Archives: ruby
When to use alias_method_chain
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Recently, I stumbled upon a fork of one of my projects in which someone made a really intelligent-sounding commit: “Remove needless indirection of alias_method_chain.” He used the term indirection, so I was duly impressed, and my curiosity was piqued: had I sinned against the programming gods and used an alias_method_chain when it wasn’t needed? No, I hadn’t. alias_method_chain is frequently abused in the Rails world, but it wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a valid use case.
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Filed under Blog
Feb 3, 2011
attr_bucket, A Gem for Your Lolrus Model
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Good evening, Internet! I hope you had a wonderful and productive workday. Now, with those pleasantries out of the way, I’d like to point you in the direction of a little gem called attr_bucket that I am regretful for having written even as I type this blog post suggesting you go try it. That is because this gem, while tiny and unassuming, has tremendous potential for evil.
Filed under Blog
Jan 27, 2011
Easy Role-Based Authorization in Rails
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Once user authentication has been added to your Rails app, authorization isn’t far behind. In fact, very basic authorization functionality exists the moment you implement user authentication. At that point, users who are logged in will have authorization to access areas of your application that others do not. The next common step is to add a boolean attribute to the User model to track whether a user is a "normal" user or someone who should have access to administer the application as well, yielding a convenient syntax like @user.admin?.
Adding an attribute to track a user’s administrator status may well be enough for a simple application, but at some point you will want something more flexible. After all, you don’t want to go adding a new column to your user table for every single possible authorization level, do you? Here’s one very easy way to handle things.
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Sep 30, 2008
Modifying Association Methods Dynamically
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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.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Aug 2, 2008
Updating MySQL DATETIMEs for Rails 2.1 Time Zones
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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!
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Filed under Uncategorized
Jun 2, 2008
About
I'm Ernie Miller. But then, you probably knew that by looking at the page title, or the URL. I'm a Ruby programmer in Louisville, Kentucky. This blog used to be called "metautonomo.us", which I thought was kind of clever, but nobody, including me, could type it. Lesson learned.