Code Quietly

Application Settings through ActiveRecord

After a few side projects I’ve noticed that I’d use this approach for a settings object pretty often. My settings table is very basic, just two columns, name and value. The magic happens inside the Settings model.

# app/model/settings.rb
class Settings < ActiveRecord::Base
  class << self
    def setup
      return if @settings
      @settings = {}
      all.each { |s| @settings[s.name.to_sym] = s.value }
    end

    def [](key)
      setup
      @settings[key]
    end
  end
end

I gave myself a setup method that cycles through every entry in my settings table and stores them in the @settings hash. Notice I call return if @settings is defined because there’s no need in rebuilding @settings. Next, I define the [] method to make the model act like a hash. Inside the [] method I return the value @settings at the position of the provided key.

It allows me to do stuff like this:

puts Settings[:name]
puts Settings[:version]

It’s really simple, but I like it. What about you?

Rake Tasks 102

This is a follow up post to Rake Tasks 101. In the 101 post we created Rake tasks, setup dependencies and made our tasks reusable by passing in parameters. In Rake Tasks 102 we’ll be building on those practices, interfacing with a Rails environment and leveraging the cron to automate our Rake task.

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Rake Tasks 101

I’ve been working with Rake quite a bit on my current project so I thought I’d share some beginner tips.

Before I go into Rake, what is it? Rake is a Ruby-based build program. Ruby on Rails uses Rake quite a bit in it’s process. If you’ve worked on a Rails project you’ll used one, some or all of the following: rake db:create, rake gems:unpack, rake db:migrate, and rake test. Now that’s not all of Rail’s Rake tasks, just some common ones.

You’re here to make your own Rake tasks so lets get started!

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Authlogic, RSpec and :priority_record=>nil... wtf.

I think Authlogic is great. I think RSpec is great, but damn did I ever give myself a confusing error. My view specs were passing so I moved onto the controllers. The controller specs passed so I moved onto the models. After the models passed I tested all of the specs and found that I had broken the controllers some how.

When running my SessionsController tests I’d get an error like this:

<UserSession (class)> received :new with unexpected arguments expected: ({:password=>"valid password", :login=>"dane"})
  got: ([{:priority_record=>nil}, nil])

At other times I’d get:

Mock "UserSession_1050" received unexpected message :priority_record= with (nil)

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