7deeds » rails

Video on Usability by Adam Dunford and Jason Edwards

Petros — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:14:02 +0000

Students can earn $4500 this summer

Petros — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:29:17 +0000

Are you a student? Are you over 18 years old? Do you want to earn $4500 this summer? Do you love Rails and think you can contribute in core code? Then you should learn all about it at Get Paid to Work on Rails.

Rails drop down lists

Petros — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:17:51 +0000

Sometimes you want to have a drop down list in your Rails application that contains both the items from a collection of model instances and some other items that are not coming from the collection.

One can combine the results of options_from_collection_for_select and options_for_select to create this. Let’s say we want to have a form with a drop down list box where we can select a category of products to display. We also want this drop down list to include an option for uncategorized products. The problem is that this option is not a real category.

We can do the following to provide that functionality. First look at the second gist which is the code for the View:

If we had three categories, for example Salads, Pizzas, and Drinks, we would get the following list:

[Uncategorized]
Salads
Pizzas
Drinks

The first option is [Uncategorized] and this comes from calling options_for_select. The rest of the options come from calling options_from_collection_for_select.

Now when that form is submitted, we can examine (see the first gist) what was selected by the user and act accordingly.

Rails and Greek

Petros — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:02:10 +0000

Rails is great when you want to start quickly and 10 minutes later have your first web application up and running. This is because many things that are needed are pre-configured. This is true but unfortunately if you live in a part of the world where everyone speaks a weird sounding language that has characters that are not standard, you have to use Unicode.

I live in this part of the world where everyone speaks Greek. Somehow we manage to communicate, but that’s another story.

I want to share with you what I found the hard way. How to setup your Rails application to handle Greek language without any problems:

I use MySQL and set everything up from the database to the table, to use DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci
In your environment.rb file, there is a section # Include your application configuration below, where you should put the following two lines:
1. $KCODE = ‘UTF8′
2. require ‘jcode’
In your database.yml, in your various configurations you add the following line:
1. encoding: utf8
IMPORTANT: in order to be able to write Greek characters in your rhtml or rb files you should save them in UTF8. Please be careful to use an editor that allows you to save in UTF8 without using a BOM. If this is not the case, Ruby interpreter will complain and you are going to get strange errors.

Disclaimer: All the tips above were/are essential if you are using Ruby 1.8.6 + Rails 1.2.3. I don’t know if installing the latest and greatest makes the tips redundant. If anyone knows, please respond with a comment here.