tj stankus

 
 

Rails App Template

18 Sep 2009

I spent some time today creating a Rails application template. As well as performing some general file cleanup, it pulls in the following tools:

I added a prompt for pulling in jQuery and provide an option for specifying the jQuery version. I also provide a bare-bones application layout file and reset browser styles with YUI reset.css. Finally, the whole thing is added to a git repo and the initial commit is made.

The source can be found here.

This tool has been out for a while and I’m impressed with its power; I wish I would’ve done this sooner. Specifically, I’m impressed with the powerful gem command; the :env option allows you to restrict gems to a specific environment. Best of all are the interactive prompt commands: ask, yes?, and no?. Using these allowed me to customize the inclusion and version of jQuery for the generated app. Cool stuff.

Further Learning Resources

Moving To Jekyll

07 Sep 2009

I’m in the process of moving my site from Wordpress to a Jekyll-based blog hosted on Github. Expect things to be a little wonky and incomplete in the meantime.

Testing HTML Strings Returned From Helpers

26 Jan 2009

Update 2009-09-10: I just noticed that the helper_me_test incorporated one of the ideas I gisted with this commit. I’m only seven months late in noticing, but hey, better late than never.

I heart assert_select. But when we’re testing helpers using ActionView::TestCase, we don’t have a response object available, and assert_select is usually used in the context of a response object. So you might think you can just pass a string of html to assert_select, but unfortunately that doesn’t work. So what’s a Rails developer to do?

You could use regular expressions. You could also vomit on your monitor and stab yourself in the eye. Luckily, there are a couple alternatives.

RSpec. I’m not really an RSpec guy, but it apparently does have support for testing html from helpers.

The helper_me_test plugin from Brian Landau of Viget Labs seems like an elegant and flexible alternative. It takes advantage of the fact that assert_select accepts an optional HTML::Node object as its first argument. I definitely recommend taking a look at that plugin, especially if you prefer hpricot. The plugin seems to have been spawned as a consequence of this thread on the Rails Lighthouse.

Ultimately I’ve chosen to write something custom, but really lightweight, which involves simply opening the String class and adding a to_node method that returns the string as an HTML::Node. I’ve gisted an example. It’s not as elegant as helper_me_test, but it’s so little code that I’ve decided it’s best for the particular app I’m working on.

Hopefully this helps someone.