Kolodvor » Rails

Number of workdays between two dates

vlado — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:55:34 +0000

It is pretty simple to get number of work days between two dates. For example we can get the number of workdays in this month.

  start_date = Date.civil(2010, 8, 1)
  end_date = Date.civil(2010, 8, 31)
  workdays = (start_date..end_date).select { |day| ![0, 6].include?(day.wday) }.size

Please note that this doesn’t include any check for holidays, you’ll need to figure that yourself (if you have need for that at all).

For more info see Array#select and Date#wday methods.

MarkItUp: Rails plugin that turns any textarea into a markup editor

vlado — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:14:09 +0000

I recently published a plugin that helps you turn any textarea into a markup editor. It is based on excellent markItUp! jQuery plugin.

Example

The most simple usage with preset defaults



  <%= javascript_include_tag "path/to/jquery" %>
  <%= mark_it_up '#miu_test' %>


  <%= form_tag do %>
    <%= text_area_tag "miu_test" %>
  <% end %>

You can see a lot more cool examples in action on markitup.cingel.hr.

More info

markitup.cingel.hr
github.com/cingel/mark_it_up

Simple Search Rails plugin

vlado — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 08:31:11 +0000

SimpleSearch brings simple search to ActiveRecord. It ads simple_search named scope that accepts query as parameter.

The idea is that you provide the query and plugin does the rest (splits query to keywords and compose where statement).

This can be very useful in case you just want to filter list of records by some query, you have autocomplete field, … or something similar.

Example

View

  <% form_tag request.path, :method => 'get' do %>
    <%= text_field_tag :query, params[:query] %>
  <% end %>

Model

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_simply_searchable
  end

  # Columns: id, login, email, crypted_password, salt

Controller

  class UsersController < ApplicationController
    def index
      @users = User.simple_search(params[:query]).all
    end
  end

Query examples

Simple query

  User.simple_search("vlado")
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE (users.id LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.crypted_password LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.salt LIKE '%vlado%')

You can also provide :columns => :column1, :column2, ... option to limit search only to those columns

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_simply_searchable :columns => :login, :email
  end

  User.simple_search("vlado")
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE (users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%')

More complex query

  User.simple_search("vlado, cingel")
  # will search for users matching 'vlado' and 'cingel' keywords
  # => SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ((users.login LIKE '%vlado%' OR users.email LIKE '%vlado%') AND (users.login LIKE '%cingel%' OR users.email LIKE '%cingel%'))

NOTE: With proper use of indexes this plugin can work quite well in most cases, but in case you have a large and complex database it is usually much better idea to use some search daemon like Thinking Sphinx.

More info

http://github.com/cingel/simple_search

Create new app with specific Rails version

vlado — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:09:50 +0000

I recently installed Rails 3 beta release but I needed to create new app with the 2.3.5. version. I was searching for a way to do that and I found this

  rails _2.3.5_ appname

Unfortunately this will produce an error similar to this

  /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: railties(3.0.0.beta not = 2.3.5) (Gem::LoadError)
	from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate'
	from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'
	from /usr/local/bin/rails3:18

To fix this first run

  which rails

and you will get a path to your rails executable, in my case this is /usr/local/bin/rails.

Then copy rails to rails3.

  sudo cp /usr/local/bin/rails /usr/local/bin/rails3

Then open this file in your text editor (TextMate in my case).

  mate /usr/local/bin/rails

and replace two last lines so that your file now looks like

  require 'rubygems'

  version = ">= 0"

  if ARGV.first =~ /^_(.*)_$/ and Gem::Version.correct? $1 then
    version = $1
    ARGV.shift
  end

  gem 'rails', version
  load 'rails'

Thats it, now you can create your app with specific Rails version with

  rails _2.3.5_ appname

Ruby library for parsing, validating and formatting phone numbers

vlado — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:19:39 +0000

Tomislav Car has just released Phone, Ruby library for phone number parsing, validation and formatting. It should save you a lot of time if you need any of the following:

* you have area where users input phone numbers in many different formats
* output phone numbers in specific format
* you need to send SMS messages from your app
* …

You can initialize new Phone object with Phone.new

  Phone.new('5125486', '91', '385')

  Phone.new(:number => '5125486', :area_code => '91', :country_code => '385')

Parsing is done using Phone.parse method

    Phone.parse '091/512-5486', :country_code => '385'
    Phone.parse '(091) 512 5486', :country_code => '385'

It is smart to set default contry code first so you don’t have to provide it as option every time

    Phone.default_country_code = '385'
    Phone.parse '091/512-5486'
    Phone.parse '(091) 512 5486'

Fow now, Phone works only for Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian and Serbian phone numbers, but Tomislav is collecting data to support other countries.

Go check it out

Rails, CSRF and Ajax requests

vlado — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:36:03 +0000

Rails protects controller actions from CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks with a token based on a random string stored in the session. The token parameter is named authenticity_token by default and will be embedded in all forms and Ajax requests generated by Rails.

You should also add this token to all Ajax request that you hand coded. As suggested in Rails documentation you can add this line in head section.

  <%= javascript_tag "window._token = '#{form_authenticity_token}'" %>;

and then add authenticity_token to parameters option of Ajax requests

  new Ajax.Request('/some/url', {
    parameters: "foo=bar&authenticity_token="+_token
  });

Remote forgery protection plugin

This can get tedious if you have a lot of Ajax requests so I wrote a simple plugin that adds authenticity token to all Ajax requests automatically.

You can install it with

  script/plugin install git://github.com/vlado/remote_forgery_protection.git

Now all you have to do is add this line inside head section of you’re layout

  <%= remote_forgery_protection %>

and all non GET Ajax request will have authenticity_token parameter automatically included.

Magic is done by wrapping Ajax.Base using Function#wrap method so this will work only if you are using Prototype.
I plan to add support for other libraries (if there is interest) in the future so keep in touch.

Remote forgery protection currently supports Prototype, jQuery and ExtJS. Let me know if you would like to see it working with some other library

Plugin page: http://github.com/vlado/remote_forgery_protection

More info:
api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/RequestForgeryProtection/ClassMethods.html
isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=1750
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery
opensoul.org/2008/10/24/ajax-and-request-forgery-protection

Radiant CMS, disable caching in development

vlado — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:14:19 +0000

I am working on extension for Radiant CMS. I wanted to disable caching for development, but wasn’t able to find right method for this, so finally I did it by putting this into my extensions activate method

if RAILS_ENV=="development"
  Page.class_eval {
    def cache?
      false
    end
  }
end

This is more of a hack then a real solution, so please use comments to point me in the right direction. I’m using Radiant version 0.8.1.

Disabeling sessions in Rails

vlado — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:35:09 +0000

The simplest way to disable sessions in Rails is to use session ff (see ActionController::SessionManagement::ClassMethods).

session ff

To disable session suport only for a specific controller add session ff to that controller

class MyController < ApplicationController
    session  ff
end

Written like that, sessions are disabled for all actions on this controller.

Like filters, you can specify nly and :except clauses to restrict subset. The following code will disable session for first_action and third_action, but not for second_action.

class MyController < ApplicationController
  session  ff,  nly %w(first_action third_action)

  def first_action
  end

  def second_action
  end

  def third_action
  end
end

Same could be achived with session ff, :except => :second_action.

The session options are inheritable, so to disable sessions for the entire application add session ff to ApplicationController.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    session  ff
end

session :disabled => true

The downside of above approach is that if you disable sessions in ApplicationController with session ff you can't enable them later on.

But luckily there is a cure for that. Instead of session ff add this line session :disabled => true to ApplicationController.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    session :disabled => true
end

Now, you can re-enable session support in an inheriting controller with session :disabled => false.

class MyController < ApplicationController
    session :disabled => false
end

Determining the number of days in a month

vlado — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:18:20 +0000

Here is a simple method that returns number of days for wanted month and year. If year is ommited current year is selected.

def month_days(month, year=Date.today.year)
  mdays = [nil, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
  mdays[2] = 29 if Date.leap?(year)mdays[month]
end

Simple examples:

month_days(1)       => 31
month_days(2, 2007) => 28
month_days(2, 2008) => 29

Now, let’s assume we have a date from a database, and we want to find number of days in a month from that date.

month_days(date.month, date.year)

But with two more lines of code

def month_days(date_or_month, year=Date.today.year)
  year = date_or_month.year if date_or_month.class == Date
  month = date_or_month.class == Date ? date_or_month.month : date_or_month

  mdays = [nil, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
  mdays[2] = 29 if Date.leap?(year)
  mdays[month]
end

we could find it like this:

month_days(date)

It is worth mentioning that if String is passed as an argument

month_days("2007-02-15")

we will get an ERROR, because first argument must be a Fixnum or a Date.

month_days("2007-02-15".to_date)

If you want to use this as a helper in Rails, create the file date_helper.rb in a lib directory of your app, and put this in:

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    module DateHelper

      def month_days(date_or_month, year=Date.today.year)
        year = date_or_month.year if date_or_month.class == Date
        month = date_or_month.class == Date ? date_or_month.month : date_or_month

        mdays = [nil, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
        mdays[2] = 29 if Date.leap?(year)
        mdays[month]
      end

    end
  end
end

and then add this line to config/environment.rb

require lib/date_helper.rb

Technorati Tags: month days, ruby

Quick Start with Rails on OS X

vlado — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:28:07 +0000

Install Ruby

OS X (10.4) comes with Ruby 1.8.2 already installed.
For a quick start this is OK so let’s install Rails.

Install Rails

Since Rails comes as gem package, first we need to install RubyGems.
Download the latest package from RubyForge and unzip it.
Now go to the directory where you unpacked the package and run

$ sudo ruby setup.rb

When asked enter your password, and after install finish you can verify that everything went well by typing:

$ gem -v

Output should look something like this, depending on version you installed

=> 0.9.4

Now installing Rails is as simple as

$ sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

To verify installation, type:

$ rails -v
=> Rails 1.2.3

Install MySQL

You can skip this step if you don’t want to use database but since Rails is a framework for developing database-backed web applications, you’ll probably want to use one.

Download the MySQL package for OS X for your platform
Double-click the drive image to mount it
Locate the MySQL installer (something like mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.pkg) and run it, authenticating as needed
Double-click MySQLStartupItem.pkg
Double-click MySQL.prefPane and install it

Once the install is complete, start the MySQL server using the control panel. ( System Preferences -> Other -> MySQL ) and check Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup

Test your installation

To start a new project (application), go to the directory where you plan to keep your applications (i.e. ~/Apps) and execute following commands

$ rails test_app
$ cd test_app
$ ./script/server

This will generate Rails skeleton in ~/Apps/test_app, and start a WEBrick server on port 3000.
Now open your browser and enter http://localhost:3000 in address bar. You should see a page with “Welcome aboard, You’re riding the Rails!” message.

We also need to tell Rails which database to use.
To do this edit database.yml file (~/Apps/test_app/config/database.yml) to look like this

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: test_app_development
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost

test:
  adapter: mysql
  database: test_app_test
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: test_app_production
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost

Naturally we also need to create a database

$ mysqladmin -u root create test_app_development

and table in that database

$ mysql -u root

mysql> create table items (
         id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
         name VARCHAR(100) );

Execute scaffold command

$ script/generate scaffold item

Open http://localhost:3000/items and if you see something like this

Listing items

Name

New item

you have everything needed to get started with Rails development so Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, rails, ruby

Kolodvor » Rails

Number of workdays between two dates

MarkItUp: Rails plugin that turns any textarea into a markup editor

Example

Simple Search Rails plugin

Example

More info

Create new app with specific Rails version

Ruby library for parsing, validating and formatting phone numbers

Rails, CSRF and Ajax requests

Remote forgery protection plugin

Radiant CMS, disable caching in development

Disabeling sessions in Rails

session ff

session :disabled => true

Further reading

Determining the number of days in a month

Quick Start with Rails on OS X

Install Ruby

Install Rails

Install MySQL

Test your installation