Avoiding Four Common Active Record Pitfalls

Active Record is a popular Object Relational Mapping system (ORM) that many web developers find themselves using at some point or another. A lot has been said about the benefits and drawbacks of ORMs in general, and Active Record shares all of them. Regardless of how you feel about it, using Active Record will be […]

There Be Dragons: Rails Callbacks and Suppression

After a long hiatus from Rails, I found myself working in a Rails codebase this week. Here at Atomic, our recent focus has been on the wins provided by our starter kit. I still love Ruby and Rails, but after digging through a well-intentioned codebase, I was reminded how much I dislike Rails magic callbacks.

Custom Rspec Matcher for N+1 Queries in Rails

Rails and Active Record make many things easy: connecting to the database, building complex queries based on your object model, and easily migrating your schema up, down, and sideways. They also let you very easily introduce N+1 queries.

How to Set Up a Rails SAML Identity Provider

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a protocol for single sign-on. SAML handles communication between a service provider (SP) and an identity provider (IdP). The identity provider acts as an authentication and identification mechanism for service providers. In this post, I’ll walk you through setting up your Rails application as a SAML IdP. This post […]

Code Generation for Rails Utility Scripts

It seems that on every Rails project I work on, I end up writing utility scripts that make changes to the production data in some way or another. Perhaps it’s pre-loading hundreds of user accounts for a customer that wants to provide a spreadsheet of users, or populating an account with fake data that can […]

Active Record Aggregate Fields via Sub-Selecting Scopes

I was recently working on a piece of code from a legacy Rails application. An unusually large number of queries being run on a particular page let me know there was an N+1 query lurking. The application was an online assessment platform dealing with assessments, questions, and responses. The question listing page was simply asking […]

Run a Local Rails Script on Heroku

Heroku provides a convenient command line interface for executing snippets of Ruby code remotely. One-liners can easily be piped into the heroku run console command. But what about much longer scripts that you write locally and want to execute in a remote Heroku environment? In this post, I’ll show you how to execute a long […]

Adding Google Charts to your Active Admin Application

Active Admin is a fantastic library for building an administrator interface for a Rails application. Not only does it make creating CRUD pages incredibly simple, but it also allows for custom views–something I discovered recently when I needed to create a dashboard page that included several charts.

A Few Tips For Getting Started With Rails

Rails does a lot of work for you. This is often beneficial, but when it makes assumptions that aren’t right for your app, it can be frustrating. In this post, I’ll discuss a few issues that can arise when you get started creating models, along with some easy solutions to them. Oh, and before I […]

Testing Data Migrations in Rails

When working on a Rails project, you will inevitably need to move data around in your database. Some join table value will need to be moved into its own table or what have you. When approaching these kinds of migrations, there are two major complications: future-proofing and testing. In this post, let’s walk through an […]

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