Rails 3 Custom Validator Quandary -- Solution Step One

Remember when I had a Rails 3 custom validator quandary? My bottom-line question was "how should I access a specific error condition, cleanly, in both an action, and a template?" I sketched a few solutions, ranging from checking for a specific error message to providing a function that indicates if the error has occurred.

For now, I want simple boolean methods on the model to encapsulate the

Simple Ajax property toggle in Rails 3.0

Entry-level overview of one way to add trivial Ajax functionality to a Rails 3.0 app, originally written for a specific audience. The repository is on github.



Let's say we have an Article model with an "approved" flag. We need to be able to toggle this flag. Normal scaffolding would have us view the article, click a checkbox, and submit. We'll keep that functionality, but add a simple

Example app test failures from authlogic user sessions

This question on stackoverflow led me to believe that if I actually ran rake test that my example app's tests would fail--and they did, with the same error. (Why I wasn't running tests from the beginning? Meh!) The tests throw up wads of stack trace, headed with this:

SQLException: no such table: user_sessions: DELETE FROM "user_sessions" WHERE 1=1

What's causing this error? We created our user

TextMate, rvm, ActiveSupport outside of Rails, "require"s from current directory, all together now!

I'm prototyping some calendar/date stuff for a Rails app in standalone scripts, and want access to both normal Rails things (in this case, ActiveSupport's date math, like Date.today - 3.days) and my own classes within the prototyping directory. I'd like to continue using TextMate's "Run" command to run the current buffer as a Ruby script, since it's convenient. I'm using rvm; my prototyping

Using email or nickname to log in using authlogic and Rails 3

This is a continuation of my first authlogic/Rails 3 post.

Authlogic users have both "login" and "email" properties by default. I wanted to allow users to log in via their email address or nickname. I tackled this in two steps. First, switch to logging in using the "email" property. Second, create a "nickname" property, and allow users to log in with either one. (Yes, I actually wanted to call

Rails 3 + authlogic explorations

I've started a simple Rails 3 + authlogic example project on github, mostly for myself to experiment with. Right now it's basically a copy of this post's implementation (and unfinished at that), but I'll be expanding it over the next few days in various ways.

As it stands, the "application" (I use the term loosely) consists of a home page (root path) requiring login, and login/logout actions.