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 be used for a demo, or manually fixing a data integration issue with an external system. Often, this requires parsing and processing a source file (like a CSV file). Read more on Code Generation for Rails Utility Scripts…
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Rails, Active Record & Postgres – Optimizing Deletions
Every Rails project I’ve worked on has used Active Record. ORMs like Active Record have many benefits. They abstract you away from the database. They make querying data elegant and simple (in most cases).
However, sometimes Active Record is not more efficient than Postgres.
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Embedding Ember in Existing Apps
My current project, an online student assessment tool, involves adding features to a Rails app built in the 2011/2012 Rails 3 era. The app was also built using Backbone.js, a custom templating language, and raw JSON responses. It was developed using good development and design practices (such as TDD, SRP, etc.), but many of these technologies have been superseded by modern frameworks such as Ember.js or Angular. Active development on this project was not going to be easy or fun.
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Uploading Files in Rails Using Paperclip and Active Admin
I recently came across a situation where I needed to be able to upload a file to a Rails server with Active Admin. I did a quick search on Google and found this post by Job, a fellow Atom.
Our use cases were a little bit different, though. He was storing the file contents directly in the database, whereas I needed to be able to uplaod a firmware image file to the server’s filesystem, parse the file name, and perform some validations on the file. I decided to use the Paperclip gem to manage the file processing and storage. Using Job’s advice on Active Admin file uploads, I expanded his example to incorporate Paperclip.
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Waiter, There’s a WordPress in My Web App!
If you’ve ever been a part of developing custom software, you’ve probably seen some features turn out to be much more complicated than anticipated. Sometimes, it’s due to unforeseen technical constraints. Other times, it’s a case of not fully understanding the nature of the feature—a situation that led me to an unexpected use for WordPress.
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Script Away Your Annoyances – Removing Manual Project Setup Tasks
In recent years I’ve come to deeply appreciate the phrase “don’t make me think.” I will forget how to perform a setup step approximately 7 seconds after I do it, let alone 3 years after I’ve done it (and I know I’m not alone!).
Thus starting to work on an existing project will often give me anxiety—not because I’m worried about learning a new domain or existing system, but because getting the dang thing running can sometimes be the hardest part! Read more on Script Away Your Annoyances – Removing Manual Project Setup Tasks…
Managing Complex Permissions in CanCanCan for Rails
We’re using the CanCanCan authorization gem to control access to resources in our current Rails project. It’s a great way to get started and covers a lot of ground with its basic and extended syntaxes, and it has decent support for adding more complex permissions checks that may not fit into more conventional patterns.
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Stop Writing Rails Controllers
Writing Rails controllers can be a pain. They exist in a weird transitional point in your application, facilitating communication between the world of hypertext, headers, and response codes (Railsy code) and your application domain. Read more on Stop Writing Rails Controllers…
Battling Rails Translations with AnnoTranslate
Localization is a complex matter in software development, and it is usually put off as a clean-up task at the end of a project. Content translation is usually contracted out and performed by non-developers, so there’s also a technical gap to overcome.
After battling Qt translations for months on a previous project, I created the AnnoTranslate Rails middleware stack plugin to ease the burden of the developer/translator interfacing and workflow in Rails apps.
Providing Context for Translators
In small-scale Rails apps, providing context information to translators with little-to-no domain knowledge can be painful, but it’s do-able in an ad-hoc fashion. As the breadth and amount of content grows, a more structured workflow is warranted, which leads to the desire to automate the tedium. Enter AnnoTranslate. Read more on Battling Rails Translations with AnnoTranslate…
Dynamically Generating CSS with Ember.js and Rails
I’m currently working on an Ember.js app that requires the color scheme to be customizable to match the branding of our client’s clients. Since our application’s CSS is being compiled by the Rails Asset Pipeline, and the colors would be fetched over an API call, this posed an interesting challenge.
Originally, there were many unknowns around how we would accomplish this. How would we recompile our SCSS? Would we wrap the Ember app under a Rails route that would insert customized CSS on the page? If we loaded the CSS via Ember, how would we insert it on the DOM?
Happily, the details all fell into place quite nicely. Here’s how we pulled it off:
1. Use the Application Route to Load the Custom Theme
Or use any other resource’s route. When loading the model for the route, we first make an API call to determine which colors to use, and then pull out the theme information and make a request to the Rails app that processes and returns the themed CSS as text. Then we create a model out of the two.
Read more on Dynamically Generating CSS with Ember.js and Rails…