Author Archives: Rob Nichols

My current applications run on Linux in production, but I still develop on Windows PCs. My main works PC runs Windows 7 Pro 64bit. This isn’t too much of a problem. Just a couple of things don’t work (like wicked_pdf), … Continue reading →

I found an interesting article by Todd Sayre on time formats in Rails. It is only short, but interesting. Based on that I created config/initializers/time_formats.rb in my latest app: # Used to create time and datetime formatting short cuts. Search … Continue reading →

I wanted to add a tool to log users’ activity in my current application. I wanted something simple, and decided that the solution was to combine two techniques: One: making session data available at the model and observer level. An … Continue reading →

Once I had attachment_fu working with files stored within the Rails application file system, I hit a problem as I wanted to be able to share files across three applications. The problem being that if the file was uploaded in … Continue reading →

I’m working on a portion of my latest application that will need a facility to upload files. As these files are not images, I decided to use the plug-in attachment_fu. The thing that has caused me the most head scratching … Continue reading →

It looks like the SQL Server adapter error I mentioned previously has been fixed. The fix was posted yesterday (21-Apr-10).

After almost a year of using test driven development, I am now a total convert. I now feel it is so vital to good development practice that, across the board, I think I can label my previous applications as bad … Continue reading →

My application has products, and each product can have components which are themselves products. I achieve this via a pair of self-referencing has_and_belongs_to_many relationships.   has_and_belongs_to_many :components,     :class_name => ‘Product’,     :join_table => "product_grouping",     :association_foreign_key … Continue reading →

I’m starting to get into test driven development. Test driven development has been advocated in the Rails community for some time (its core to the “Agile” coding methodology) but to be honest I’ve not bothered with it much. I am … Continue reading →

Error causes INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS to be appended to database name when using connection.select. Continue reading →