Paddy's Blog

Archive for 'Rails'

Search comma separated values db column in Rails

Posted on November 22, 2009, under MySQL, Rails.

I wanted to search for a value in DB and the column data is comma separated values say …

foo,bar,hey,hay

Now I wanted to find a record based on the value …say …hay

MySQL’s FIND_IN_SET comes into play and it works as follows

Model.find(:first, :conditions => ["FIND_IN_SET(?,search_column)", search_string])

Hope this helps!

Making will_paginate to work with acts_as_taggable_on_steriods

Posted on September 1, 2009, under Rails.

After going through, few post on pagination for the tags, this worked for me.

<%
 size = Upload.find_tagged_with(params[:id]).length
 @uploads = Upload.paginate_tagged_with(params[:id], :total_entries => size, :page => params[:page], :per_page => 1)
%>

Is Active

Posted on April 13, 2009, under Rails.

  def is_active?
    (start_date .. expiry_date) === DateTime.now
  end

Run Controller Spec

Posted on February 21, 2009, under Rails, Shell Scripts.

If you just wanted to run only the controller specs, then you have to use the following command

rake spec:controllers

Select Random Records

Posted on February 18, 2009, under MySQL, Rails.

I wanted for some reason to have random records from a model without any condition, just random records and here’s how you have to do it.

Hope this helps somebody!

Cheers!!!

Rails Default Layout

Posted on February 15, 2009, under Rails.

As we all know, for any controller, by default rails looks the controller name .rthml files and if it doesn’t exists then it looks application.rhtml.

Since my site is very simple, I don’t have many layouts and just one layout and so i stored the layout file in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb and i removed all other layout files so that by default it will read application.html.erb.

Hope this helps somebody!

Pads

Load Fixtures into the Database

Posted on February 12, 2009, under Rails.

I was looking to load the fixtures into my database and it is very simple. Please look at the following code

rake spec:db:fixtures:load

Hope this helps somebody.

Cheers!

Pads

Migartion in Different Envirnoments

Posted on February 10, 2009, under Rails.

Wanna run db:migrate command in other environments rather than development, then it is how so:

Test Environment

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

Production Environment

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Obviously, these commands has to be executed from the root path of the application.

See ya

Hacking a nil object / Workaround

Posted on February 6, 2009, under Rails.

I was looking for a way to workaround a nil object. For instance if @project.name is nil, I wanted to display as “N/A” and otherwise the project name (@project.name)

Normal Way

<% unless @project.nil? %>
  <%=  @project.name %>
<% else %>
  <%=  "N/A" %>
<% end  %>

Another Way

<%= @project.name rescue nil || "N/A" %>

Just in a one single line!, Neat ah

Hope this helps!

Reset button in Rails

Posted on February 4, 2009, under Rails.

I was looking for a way to have a reset button in the rails way, instead of the direct HTML tag.

<%= submit_tag "Start over", :name => "reset", :type => "reset", :id => "task_reset" %>