Hi

I know there are a lot of posts about the rails “dangerous” form_tag helper method, but why not another one.

Before saying anything about it, I want to write down the differences between form_tag and form_for (which was the choosen one previously). form_for is provided for updating data models and form_tag is provided for doing the other form operations (search something, change language in a page, etc).

Ok, after this, let’s go to the battle. This was my code

< % form_tag :controller => 'pages', :action => 'index' , :method => 'get' do %>
Tags : < %= text_field_tag :tags, '', :size => 40 %>
< %= submit_tag 'Search' %>
< % end %>

and I didn’t got the html code what I wanted to obtain, after googling for a while, I found this post which got me to the right way to see the light. The reason of this problem was that I was not using the right syntax for form_tag, which is

form_tag(url_for_options = {}, options = {}, *parameters_for_url, &block)

so my code became

< % form_tag({:controller => 'pages', :action => 'index'} , {:method => 'get'}) do %>
Tags : < %= text_field_tag :tags, '', :size => 40 %>
< %= submit_tag 'Search' %>
< % end %>

and I was happy again

Hope this silly problem helps not to waste your time (I did it for you )

M.

Two days ago, I was solving bugs in my new professional website (not available yet at http://www.miqueloliete.com) when I stared at the screen and noticed how ugly my url was (something/home/home).

In that moment I remembered that I had read something in Agile Development with rails about how to use routes.rb, so I decided to give it a go.

I add to this files these sentences

map.connect 'home/', :controller => 'home', :action => 'home'
map.connect 'about_me/', :controller => 'home', :action => 'about_me'
map.connect 'cv/', :controller => 'home', :action => 'cv'
map.connect 'projects/', :controller => 'home', :action => 'projects'

and ‘home/home’ became ‘home’, ‘home/cv’ became ‘cv’, etc

M.

Hi

When a migration is created, rails add a column named id, which is defined as an integer, as table’s primary key column. Sometimes can happen that you don’t want to name your primary key column id using rails. The way you have to write your migration is this one (rails use integer type by default):


def self.up
create_table :airport, :primary_key => :airport_id do |t|
t.string :iso_code, :limit =>3, :null => false
t.string :name, :limit =>150, :null => false
t.integer :city_id, :null => false
end
end


If you have a “many to many” table probably you don’t want to have this id column in your table and you want to define two columns as primary key. This is the way you have to write a migration if you want to define this primary key:


def self.up
create_table :airports_cities, :primary_key => [:airport_id, city_id] do |t|
t.integer :distance, :null => false
end
end


In both examples, columns defined as primary key don’t have to be defined because rails do it for you. Using this, you won’t have an id column in your table and you’ll be able to use whatever you want as primary key (even strings).

Hope this helps (to my fish-like memory or to somebody else’s brain).

M.

Howto create the table to store sessions in Rails

rake db:sessions:create


Howto truncate all *.log files in log/ to zero bytes

rake log:clear


M.

Sometimes, a search has to be coded in an application and if you are using rails, probably you’ll use will_paginate. It is a good piece of software, easy to install and easy to use but, if it’s not used correctly, problems may appear.

I use it using a form_for rails’s tag and four search criteria in it. After coding it, I added will_paginate and after doing my first search, I paginated to the second page…it came empty. After googling a little, I noticed that I was sending info using POST method and will_paginate needs GET method to work properly, so the only thing needed was:

:html => { :method => :get}


and it worked perfectly, passing parameters to the next pagination.

Hope this helps, it’s something silly but sometimes silly things made people go into the dark side of coding

M.