Ruby on Rails Planet

Launching Ruby on Rails projects, the video »

Created at: 11.11.2009 20:00, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON Projects agile development clients presentation conference rubyonrails video

For those of you who didn’t make it to Rails Underground in July to witness my mind-blowing talk, Launching Ruby on Rails projects , it appears that Skills Matter has finally posted a video of it online. :-)

The sound levels are really low… but hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

You can also view the slides.

Video

For those that prefer visual learning, I’ve even whipped together a short screencast where I install MongoDB on OSX, fire it up, and build a really basic note app. Enjoy!

more »

Getting Started With MongoMapper and Rails »

Created at: 24.07.2009 01:17, source: RailsTips - Home, tagged: mongodb mongomapper gems video

Warning: This is currently out of date as it was based on an older version of MongoMapper.

I have had a few requests for tips on getting started with MongoDB and Rails so I thought I would drop some quick knowledge. It is actually really easy to get going, but Rails always does everything for you so when something comes along that doesn’t, you sometimes feel lost.

rails mongomapper_demo
cd mongomapper_demo

Now that your Rails shell is created, let’s add MongoMapper to the mix. Open up environment.rb. First, configure it as a gem, then remove ActiveRecord from the mix, and lastly, point it at a database.

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.gem 'mongomapper', :version => '>= 0.2.1'
  config.frameworks -= [:active_record]
end

MongoMapper.database = "myappname-#{Rails.env}"

As of now there are no fancy generators for your models (gasp!) so you can just create a new file in app/models and an accompanying file in test/unit. Or, if you like, you can use script generate like so and just adjust your model after it is created (until I or some kind soul gets around to generators).

script/generate model Note --skip-migration

Then you can just change your app/models/note.rb file to be something like this:

class Note
  include MongoMapper::Document
  
  key :title, String
  key :body, String
end

I’d like to say there is more to it, but there isn’t. :) Don’t worry about creating your database or migrating it. It all happens on the fly.

Video

For those that prefer visual learning, I’ve even whipped together a short screencast where I install MongoDB on OSX, fire it up, and build a really basic note app. Enjoy!

more »

Uploadify and Rails 2.3 »

Created at: 21.07.2009 14:00, source: RailsTips - Home, tagged: file uploads flash paperclip video

In which I show how to reach the promised land of multiple file uploads using Uploadify, a spot of rack middleware and Rails 2.3.

A few weeks back we (Steve and I) added multiple asset upload to Harmony using Uploadify. If you are thinking that sounds easy, you would be sorely mistaken. Uploadify uses flash to send the files to Rails. This isn’t a big deal except that we are using cookie sessions on Harmony and flash wasn’t sending the session information with the files, so to Rails the files appeared as unauthenticated.

We found multiple articles online showing how to get this working, but none of them worked as promised. At the time Harmony was running on Rails 2.2. Knowing that rack was probably the best way to solve our issue, we updated to 2.3, which was pretty painless, and started hacking. Be sure to check out a quick screencast of the finished product at some point as well.

Add Uploadify

First, we added the uploadify files and the following js to the assets/index view. We actually set many more options, but these are the ones pertinent to this article. Script is the url to post the files to. fileDataName is the name of the file field you would like to use. scriptData is any additional data you would like to post to the url.

<%- session_key_name = ActionController::Base.session_options[:key] -%>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $('#upload_files').fileUpload({  
      script          : '/admin/assets',
      fileDataName    : 'asset[file]',
      scriptData      : {
        '<%= session_key_name %>' : '<%= u cookies[session_key_name] %>',
        'authenticity_token'  : '<%= u form_authenticity_token if protect_against_forgery? %>'
      }
  });
</script>

As you can see, it adds the session key and the cookie value along with the authenticity token as data that gets sent with the file. We then use a piece of rack middleware to intercept the upload and properly set the Rails session cookie.

Add Some Middleware

We created an app/middleware directory and added it to the load path in environment.rb.

%w(observers sweepers mailers middleware).each do |dir|
  config.load_paths << "#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/#{dir}" 
end

Next, we dropped flash_session_cookie_middleware.rb in the app/middleware directory.

require 'rack/utils'

class FlashSessionCookieMiddleware
  def initialize(app, session_key = '_session_id')
    @app = app
    @session_key = session_key
  end

  def call(env)
    if env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /^(Adobe|Shockwave) Flash/
      params = ::Rack::Utils.parse_query(env['QUERY_STRING'])

      unless params[@session_key].nil?
        env['HTTP_COOKIE'] = "#{@session_key}=#{params[@session_key]}".freeze
      end
    end

    @app.call(env)
  end
end

And, finally, we added the following to our session_store.rb initializer.

ActionController::Dispatcher.middleware.insert_before(
  ActionController::Session::CookieStore, 
  FlashSessionCookieMiddleware, 
  ActionController::Base.session_options[:key]
)

This inserts our middleware before ActionController’s CookieStore so that everything will just work as expected.

Assign the Content Type

The only other thing we needed to do was manually set the content type of the file. We were using paperclip (which is awesome) to do uploads, so something like this did the trick:

@asset.file_content_type = MIME::Types.type_for(@asset.original_filename).to_s

Be sure to add the mime type gem to your environment.rb file as well.

config.gem 'mime-types', :lib => 'mime/types'

But Why?

So why did we go through all this trouble to allow multiple uploads at once? Taking a quick look at the finished product might help. I didn’t record the entire screen in the video, as we haven’t actually released Harmony yet (ooooh secrets!), but I did capture enough that you can see the awesome uploads in action.

Hope this spares some other poor soul attempting the same thing some time.

more »

Uploadify and Rails 2.3 »

Created at: 21.07.2009 14:00, source: RailsTips - Home, tagged: file uploads paperclip flash video

A few weeks back we (Steve and I) added multiple asset upload to Harmony using Uploadify. If you are thinking that sounds easy, you would be sorely mistaken. Uploadify uses flash to send the files to Rails. This isn’t a big deal except that we are using cookie sessions on Harmony and flash wasn’t sending the session information with the files, so to Rails the files appeared as unauthenticated.

We found multiple articles online showing how to get this working, but none of them worked as promised. At the time Harmony was running on Rails 2.2. Knowing that rack was probably the best way to solve our issue, we updated to 2.3, which was pretty painless, and started hacking. Be sure to check out a quick screencast of the finished product at some point as well.

Add Uploadify

First, we added the uploadify files and the following js to the assets/index view. We actually set many more options, but these are the ones pertinent to this article. Script is the url to post the files to. fileDataName is the name of the file field you would like to use. scriptData is any additional data you would like to post to the url.

<%- session_key_name = ActionController::Base.session_options[:key] -%>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $('#upload_files').fileUpload({  
      script          : '/admin/assets',
      fileDataName    : 'asset[file]',
      scriptData      : {
        '<%= session_key_name %>' : '<%= u cookies[session_key_name] %>',
        'authenticity_token'  : '<%= u form_authenticity_token if protect_against_forgery? %>'
      }
  });
</script>

As you can see, it adds the session key and the cookie value along with the authenticity token as data that gets sent with the file. We then use a piece of rack middleware to intercept the upload and properly set the Rails session cookie.

Add Some Middleware

We created an app/middleware directory and added it to the load path in environment.rb.

%w(observers sweepers mailers middleware).each do |dir|
  config.load_paths << "#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/#{dir}"
end

Next, we dropped flash_session_cookie_middleware.rb in the app/middleware directory.

require 'rack/utils'

class FlashSessionCookieMiddleware
  def initialize(app, session_key = '_session_id')
    @app = app
    @session_key = session_key
  end

  def call(env)
    if env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /^(Adobe|Shockwave) Flash/
      params = ::Rack::Utils.parse_query(env['QUERY_STRING'])
      
      unless params[@session_key].nil?
        env['HTTP_COOKIE'] = "#{@session_key}=#{params[@session_key]}".freeze
      end
    end
    
    @app.call(env)
  end
end

And, finally, we added the following to our session_store.rb initializer.

ActionController::Dispatcher.middleware.insert_before(
  ActionController::Session::CookieStore, 
  FlashSessionCookieMiddleware, 
  ActionController::Base.session_options[:key]
)

This inserts our middleware before ActionController’s CookieStore so that everything will just work as expected.

Assign the Content Type

The only other thing we needed to do was manually set the content type of the file. We were using paperclip (which is awesome) to do uploads, so something like this did the trick:

@asset.file_content_type = MIME::Types.type_for(@asset.original_filename).to_s

Be sure to add the mime type gem to your environment.rb file as well.

config.gem 'mime-types', :lib => 'mime/types'

But Why?

So why did we go through all this trouble to allow multiple uploads at once? Taking a quick look at the finished product might help. I didn’t record the entire screen in the video, as we haven’t actually released Harmony yet (ooooh secrets!), but I did capture enough that you can see the awesome uploads in action.

Hope this spares some other poor soul attempting the same thing some time.

more »

bgror