Offer HN: Help with Ruby on Rails

I can't find the original post, but NDA = "No deal, amateur."

Otherwise you need to re-engineer all model mapping in Rails. Technically possible, but hardly makes sense. My email is vlad@videolla.com

If you can't get stuff working with the rails helpers you can always hand write the html yourself. I need to do this once in awhile. I prefer using formtastic for my current project and I've had to hand write some html to add custom logic to a formtastic form. (I prefer not to abstract one off hacks until I need to do it twice)

Rails does a lot of stuff but it doesn't do everything. If the built in tools don't do it, build your own.

> 1. I'd like several submit buttons on a form that do different things.

The only way to target these is javascript hackery, use the text on the submit button or find an alternative method that doesn't rely on multiple forms.

> 2. If you have two forms on a page, can you set it up so changes on both forms are saved when any submit button is clicked?

Without javascript, not happening. For a rails solution to combine two forms, look at fields_for.

All that said,

Without specific details (screenshots, etc.) I can't really figure out what you are trying to do. I assume you have a valid reason for asking the question. Sorry if I wasn't able to help.

2. Yes. Just make the form a single big form with two submit buttons, so they look like two forms.

    # config/routes.rb
    map.resource :pets, :member => [:show, :update]

    # app/views/pets/status.html.haml
    - form_tag update_pets_path do
      .cat_fields
        - fields_for @cat do |f|
          = f.text_field :status
        = submit_tag
      .dog_fields
        - fields_for @dog do |f|
          = f.text_field :status
        = submit_tag
  
    # app/controllers/pets_controller.rb
    def show
      @cat = Pet.find_by_species("cat")
      @dog = Pet.find_by_species("dog")
    end

    def update
      ["cat", "dog"].each do |species|
        pet = Pet.find_by_species(species)
        pet.update_attributes(params[species])
      end
    end

1) Dig into your problems with these gems and either fix or replace them 2) Think again if you really need Rails 3. What are some benefits that you will get from that upgrade?

I'd suggest 2 approach. Rails 2.3 is a very solid version and is used in many apps. I don't see reason to "upgrade for upgrade". Especially if there is some friction and not enough time.

I recently made very small project on Rails 2 just because all I needed was ActiveScaffold(not available in Rails3 atm)- which is really awesome for some stuff btw.

anyway, if you list them we might be able to make some suggestions.

This is a really simple beginners tutorial, hope it helps.

In your original page, along with the form, you need to bind an event to the form's "ajax:success" event.

The rails.js ujs driver binds to forms and links with "data-remote=true", which is what the ":remote => true" is doing, to make them submit their requests remotely, but that is where the Rails magic stops.

The good news is that the remote requests fires off some events you can bind to, which give you access to the data returned by the server (which fire off in the following order):

  ajax:before
  ajax:loading
  ajax:success
  ajax:complete
  ajax:failure
  ajax:after

  $('#myform').bind('ajax:success', function(evt, data, status, xhr){
    xhr.responseText;
  });

Of course, it's proper to also bind to the failure event with some error handling as well.

I usually don't even use the action.js.erb method of returning javascript, I just have my controller render the HTML partial, and then I have a binding like this in the page:

  $('#myform').bind('ajax:success', function(evt, data, status, xhr){
    $('#target-div').html(xhr.responseText);
  });

As for authentication, I am a big fan of rolling my own auth. Once you have a nice functioning authentication system you worked out yourself, moving it from project to project is simple. The problem I have had with all the authentication plugins, is they insert too much automagic in something that should be simple to understand, and realistically, is a pretty easy concept. There are many guides on authentication, and playing with it is a great way to learn several fundamental rails security ideas that will be helpful in other areas (log filtering, attribute accessors on models).

LinkedIn suck. Its something from myspace age. There are multiple problems with it but its still #1 HR tool

Would be cool if you can make LinkedIn-like network or just start with directory that would be great for searching and hiring best experts.

Extra bonuses: Import users data from LI, Fb, etc Smart limiting contacting abilities to prevent spamming. Smart ratings for ppl based on their social impact (like hn karma, stackoverflow rating, github, etc)

Mortality bonus: "Pay to pitch" feature. Instead of spending $400 to post job ads on 37signals job board, recruiter can pitch his ad to top 400 Rails developers. Developers have to reply and can donate these money to some charity of their chose.

Let me know if you are interested or need more clarification with that idea

setup for Mac OS X (not very different for Ubuntu just apt-get rvm)

http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby...

Get started->

http://railstutorial.org/

http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

http://ruby.runpaint.org/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/8/29/rails-3-0-it-s-done

http://railsnotes.com/rails-3/

Why Rails, interesting anecdote from how 2 pythonistas decided to go rails.

http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2010/09/how-two-pythonistas-ac...

The reason I say find a project like this, is because if you don't have actual problems to solve, you won't know what to read about. You can read about rails routing all you want, but until you have a reason to use rails routing in any sort of complex way (resourceful nested routes, like a user has many photos => /users/1/photos) you can't really do anything with it.

Once you have a project and have questions, this is a great way to get help, however, without a project we are all flying in the dark with you :)

Rspec: Behavior Driven Development Framework. It is essentially a different approach to testing than the test/unit (which Rails uses by default). In Rspec you are more interested in testing the side effects of your code, i.e. its behavior, you are less concerned with the internals. This doesn't mean you should write huge methods, and in the end your specs and tests will look pretty similar. My company uses Rspec on our main project.

http://gist.github.com/649417

People will argue the value of the different styles until they're blue in the face. I liked Rspec's syntax more so thats where I started, but in the end I know both and think they each have their own merits and its probably a total wash. Recently with things like shoulda and other tools both approaches are rapidly converging on the same feature set.

Cucumber: Integration framework. This tests your whole stack end-to-end. Depending on what you are building this may be the only way to test it, and for a lot of people they are just doing Unit + Integration tests and not writing any controller tests. You write in Gherkin (http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/wiki/gherkin) which is a special subset of English. You can also use Steak (http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/steak-because-cucumber-is-f...) which lets you write your story in pure Ruby. Either way, this story is broken out in to steps and then some driver follows those steps, either driving or emulating a web browser. The original driver was Webrat, which you can think of as a web browser in Ruby. Webrat has been replaced by Capybara which is more complete and has pluggable backends, including Selenium. If you aren't using much JavaScript you can stay in pure Ruby and your tests will be parsing the HTML with something like Nokogiri, this is also pretty fast. If you have complex JS you can actually drive Selenium which in turn will drive a real browser (you can even drive flock of different browsers). Depending on how complex you get this can be a total PITA, so I would start simple with just getting it running in pure Ruby and maybe testing your sign-up form.

Story -> Cucumber -> Capybara -> Selenium -> Firefox... its a lot of layers and as a result can be suuuuuuper slow.

Factories: Instead of pre-loading a database with stuff (fixtures), factories let you write code that returns prepped objects for you. ActiveRecord takes a row from a table and converts it to an Object (Object Relational Mapper - ORM). Say a post from the posts table into a Post object. Factory Girl will just make you a Post object. I much prefer factories because you can actually get a stack trace to figure out where all the data came from instead of shifting between a SQL database, a YAML file, and a Ruby file to find your 'fixture fail'. There are some variations on preferred syntax and Factory Girl supports most of them.

Shoulda: Just some macros to save you typing. Most of them work in both Test/Unit and Rspec. Instead of writing a test like this to ensure there is a validation error if number in't a number:

http://gist.github.com/649419

Just saves you time and typing, at the expense of learning the helpers.

A good test is something that breaks when the code breaks. Start small, test a few 3 line methods and then build up successively higher tests. Read the tests of some projects on github to get a feel for what they're looking to test, and how they approach it. Then just ask a lot of questions.

I'm by no means an expert but feel free to hit me up and I'll see if I can help: dev@evan.co.nz

I am looking at exploring mini_fb in the next few days (http://github.com/appoxy/mini_fb) for my new project, and for replacing facebooker/facebook connect in my ongoing startup (http://ridewithgps.com) towards.

It also helps to have a decent grasp of git, you'll be using it a lot for installing things and getting resources from the community. Other than that, it's all personal opinion and you'll work out something that works for you soon enough.

I recommend railstutorial.org as the first and most important stop for Rails learning anyway, so you should try following his instructions for setting up an environment:

http://railstutorial.org/book#sec:rubygems

In terms of getting your app in front of the public quickly and easily, you can't look past Heroku. It has an awesome free account and you won't need to start paying until you want to either a) increase your traffic, or b) run background tasks (such as scheduled bulk emails or something like that)

Can you also check my service - http://videolla.com ? It might be great for donation or "paywhatyouwant" based tutorials and screencasts on Rails. (I just got good reviews from Ryan Bates and DHH :) )Maybe we can partner in some way?