Time Zones, Ruby on Rails, and MySQL

A few months ago, I had the privilege of taking a Rails 3 application national. One of the requirements for doing so was ensuring that it supported each of the four time zones in the contiguous United States of America. Just switching the application from EST to UTC and using JavaScript to render times to … Continue reading Time Zones, Ruby on Rails, and MySQL →

strip_attributes, Rails 3, shoulda 2.11 hack

I have never understood why Rails doesn't strip attributes by default. I know at least one person who tried committing it to core, only to have it rejected. I always end up installing the strip_attributes plugin. I'm ramping-up a new Rails 3 project, with Shoulda 2.11. I installed strip_attributes. It works, but the strip_attributes Shoulda macros don't … Continue reading strip_attributes, Rails 3, shoulda 2.11 hack →

SSL in Ruby on Rails

Update The world has shifted since I wrote this solution and blog post. The popularization of Firesheep and concerted efforts in understanding and optimizing SSL performance has led to the wise trend of enforcing HTTPS everywhere. There are much better (and simpler) ways to secure Rails applications. The one aspect of my solution that I still recommend incorporating … Continue reading SSL in Ruby on Rails →

Rails path and url helpers

Sometimes I forget the simple differences between Rail's helpers. This mini post is so I don't forget. *_path Generates relative URLs: /users Used in views by link_to, form_for, etc. (per DHH) The browser maps relative URLs to absolute URLs based on the current page's protocol and host (/users on the page http://domain.com/new translates to http://domain.com/users) … Continue reading Rails path and url helpers →

assert_raise in Rails Integration Tests

Today I wanted to assert that a POST from an integration test resulted in an exception being raised under certain conditions. I had done this bunch of times in unit and controller tests, so I just ported that methodology to my integration test. Here is a contrived example of how my original test read: def … Continue reading assert_raise in Rails Integration Tests →