Author Archives: peter

  • 29
  • May

Migrating RSpec to Mocha

I have been using the builtin RSpec mocking framework for a couple of years and haven’t had any issues with it. The one feature I have been missing though is the any_instance method of the Mocha framework. What this method … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails Tagged ,
  • 11
  • May

PostgreSQL Unreliable Default Sort Order and Random Rails Test Failures

We have been struggling with intermittent Rails test failures for quite some time. There were times when we blamed our search engine Ferret, sometimes we blamed database interference between tests, and sometimes higher powers. Lately we have realized that all … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails
  • 05
  • May

Rails 2.3.2 Bug – Sending Multipart Email Breaks When Current Directory is not RAILS_ROOT

We had the debugging session of the year here at Newsdesk the other day and we thought it would be prudent to warn other people about it. It turns out that ActionMailer in Rails 2.3.2 fails in sending multipart emails … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails
  • 04
  • May

Enabling/Disabling the Rails Cache

We needed a way to globally enable/disable the Rails cache so we came up with this patch: By default ActionController will use the Rails.cache (RAILS_CACHE) object configured by config.cache_store for its fragment caching (action caching is an around filter that … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails
  • 14
  • Apr

Announcing Cachable Model – A New Plugin For Caching Your Rails Models

When you scale a Rails website the database layer tends to become the bottleneck sooner or later as it’s more difficult to scale horizontally with hardware than the Ruby/web server layer. At MyNewsdesk we have started looking at database caching … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails Tagged ,
  • 24
  • Feb

Rails Gotcha: Mocking/Stubbing on an Associated ActiveRecord Object

In RSpec it is still not possible to have mocks or stubs on all instances of a class, although this has been suggested and it is a feature of the Mocha framework. Stubbing or mocking an object returned by an … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Uncategorized
  • 26
  • Jan

Rails Tip: Safe Usage of URI.parse

As documented already by Doug URI.parse will thrown an exception if your URL has a trailing space. It also throws an exception on invalid URLs in general. To avoid having URI.parse bomb on your pages you can use a construct … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Uncategorized
  • 18
  • Jan

Keep Your I18n Translation Files Tidy

I added the Rake task translate:remove_obsolete_keys that lets you remove all obsolete translations from your YAML files. How is a translation rendered obsolete? Suppose you are translating from english to a number of other languages. Over time you may end … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails
  • 15
  • Jan

Configuring Exception Handling in RSpec and Controller Tests

The ActionController::Rescue module in Rails defines a number of exceptions that will trigger a 404 response, namely ActionController::RoutingError, ActionController::UnknownAction, and ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound. However if you trigger one of those exceptions in a controller test (Test::Unit or Rspec) then rescue and display … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails, Services
  • 13
  • Jan

acts_as_bitfield Plugin now Radio Button Compatible

I’ve patched the acts_as_bitfield plugin to recognize “true” as true so that now instead of having to write: <%= f.radio_button(:email_activated, true, :checked => (“checked” if @item.email_activated?)) %> Yes <%= f.radio_button(:email_activated, false, :checked => (“checked” unless @item.email_activated?)) %> No you can … Continue reading →

Posted by peter View Comments Posted in Ruby on Rails, Uncategorized