Not so far ago I have found a weird bug in the Open Source Ruby gem called composite_primary_keys, occurred when you specify :primary_key option for has_one or has_many association. There are two ways to get it fixed: submit an issue and wait till someone will work out this problem or fix it by yourself and then pull request to get the patch merged into the core. This is a great library and I use it in almost all my project, so I decided to help the author and fix this bug by myself. Here I will show you how to do that.
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I use RSpec in all my projects. It’s really hard to overemphasize how helpful it is and how much easier becomes your life if you have good specs coverage. But its outstanding flexibility enables many ways to make your specs awful: horribly slow, over-bloated, even non-readable sometimes. I do not want to teach you BDD and RSpec here, but instead I will give you some ideas how to improve your specs quality and increase efficiency of your BDD workflow.
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Today we will talk about code organization in Ruby on Rails projects. As everybody knows, Ruby on Rails is a conventional framework, which means you should follow framework architects’ decisions (put your controllers inside app/controllers, move all your logic into models, etc.) But there are many open questions around those conventions. In this write-up I will try to summarize my personal experience and show how I usually solve these problems.
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You are developing a large Web application. Controllers are full of complex data retrieving logic, views contain tons of blocks, partials, loops. One day you will receive an email with user complaints about some of your pages slowness. There are many profiling tools, some of them are easy (ruby-prof), others are large and complex (newrelic), but regardless of this it’s really hard to find the particular place where you have a real bottleneck. So we created really simple, but über-useful tool for ruby code profiling.
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Sometimes we need to write small console scripts which do some background processing on our models. In Scribd we are using Loops to run these tasks (check Alexey Kovyrin’s introduction post). One of our scripts supposed to generate some sort of html reports, and we need to generate links to our site there.
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