There are a number of good articles describing the setup of bower with rails applications, but I was having a hard time finding a good description for how to integrate Bower, Rails, and javascript components that contain CSS and images. Specifically, I was trying to use bower to manage my applications dependency on select2.

TL;DR;

Use the bower-rails gem.

I ran into a situation today where I had 10 long running background processes that were getting bogged down because we were missing an index. The app is running on Heroku on a shared database, so I don’t have the luxury of using psql to add the needed index. However, I wanted to figure out a way to add the index without restarting the long-running processes.

Edit: This was originally posted on my companies blog.

Wheew… what a title… kinda dry, very geeky, but if you landed here, hopefully this will help. This blog documents some of the code wrangling that we did for a recent app, VRCompliance. I needed to have the ability to create multiple phone numbers when inputting either addresses or people in our system. It seemed like a great time to use models with with the :accepts_nested_attributes_for :nested_model declaration. When doing this I found out that the default creation of a nested object was not what I wanted. Essentially, I wanted a find_or_create for the nested object. After some searching I came across this StackOverflow article that describes a solution. This post adds to the discussed solution by going into additional detail and fleshing out the answer described in the previous link.

I’ve had my emacs configuration under version control for the better part of the last decade, cvs then svn, and for the last 3 years git. I finally bit the bullet, and purged it of private data. Since I doubt the history is that interesting to most people, I kept a local historical branch, and then truncated the master branch which is now available in my github repos.

I used to use a monolithic .emacs file. When I declared .emacs bankruptcy a few years ago, I followed @rmm5t’s and @defunkt’s conventions… albeit probably not as nicely.

I meant to write this up awhile ago, but just want to get it out… Have you ever decided to massage incoming data in a :before_validation. I ran into an issue recently where I added a change to a before_validation to remove extraneous characters from phone numbers. I already had a ton of numbers in the system, so I thought I would then be able to just iteration through the list of phone numbers and resave them, and voila… my data would be updated and I could then enable additional validation checks.

I have just updated my Shoulda snippets for the Emacs YASnippets templating package. Shoulda is a ruby-based testing framework that consists of test macros, assertions, and helpers added on to the Test::Unit ruby framework. The snippets are based, and in many cases copied from the TextMate Shoulda snippet bundle, and modified where needed to work with the YASnippets package. New features in the recently released 0.6beta of YASnippet allow support for more of the TextMate-based snippets. The new YASnippet functionality is discussed in more detail in a post I did on Emacs Blog.

In order to port many of the snippets over from the TextMate bundle I wrote a script that automates the process. There is a Python script that does something very similar. The writing of my script was more of just a code kata for me, so take a look at both. One may be more suitable for your needs.

If you have tried

1

$ rake db:structure:dump

in a rails app when using Oracle as your database, then you have probably been slightly disappointed. The same rake task for MySQL and Postgres dumps everything you need to recreate the database. The task for Oracle only dumps SQL for the table creation (no constraints), and for the sequences. The active_record_oracle_extensions plug now supports dumping sql for the following:

• primary keys
• indexes
• foreign keys
• synonyms

I have added enough functionality to scratch my itch. If you need something else or find a bug let me know.

NOTE: This post is OBE. Check out the active record oracle adapter. Most/all changes have been added to it.

The active_record_oracle_extensions plugin provides support for adding foreign keys to migrations, adding synonyms to migrations, and disabling foreign key constraints during fixture loading. These are features that I needed in my applications, but either did not exist in other plugins, or the plugins seem to have been abandoned.