Rails Tip: Labels with form_for

If you use “form_for” you may have noticed in Rails 2.0 that there is now a label method to create html label tags: This is great for two reasons:

1. It syncs the label tag’s “for” attribute with the “id” of whatever input field you create. This awesome for standards and accessibility!
2. It will automatically create label text based off the method argument you pass in.

So instead of doing this:

  
<%- form_for @post do |f| -%>
  <div>
      <label for="post_title">Title</label>
      <%= f.text_field :title %>
  </div>
...
  

You can now do this! Which will take the method argument (:title) and create the label text (“Title”).

<%- form_for @post do |f| -%>
  <div>
      <%= f.label :title %>
      <%= f.text_field :title %>`
  </div>
...

Also, if you have label text that doesn’t quite match the method of your object or maybe you need the string to be translated in a different language. You can do this as well:

  
<%- form_for @post do |f| -%>
  <div>
    <%= f.label :title, _('Title') %>
    <%= f.text_field :title %>
  </div>
...
  

Neh Meh Yeh - Now with more features

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http://nehmehyeh.com

Don’t throw cats

Just some words of wisdom.

ul·ti·ma·cy

1 : the quality or state of being ultimate

2 : the ultimate intimacy

Used in a sentence: Matt has taken intimacy to the next level, ultimacy

Share More Controller Specs with do_action

For most projects, our controllers tend to have some shared behavior that inherits from a base controller. Such as before filters for authentication or finding an AR model. RSpec also has a similar concept know as “shared behaviors”.

But it’s kind of difficult to do something like:

it 'should redirect to login if not logged in' do
  do_post
  response.should redirect_to(new_sessions_path)
end

because it might be a do_get, do_put, or do_delete.

do_action let’s you push common controller specs into a shared context without having to specify the exact action being called. add this to your spec_helper.rb

def do_action
  %w(get post put delete render).each do |action|
    self.send "do_#{action}" if self.respond_to?("do_#{action}")
  end
end

And now you can put the previous code in a shared login spec

it 'should redirect to login if not logged in' do
  do_action
  response.should redirect_to(new_sessions_path)`
end

Refresh Phoenix & Blueprint

Matt Gist and myself will be presenting Blueprint a CSS framework at Refresh Phoenix on Nov 6th.

Other resources:

1. Blueprint Grid CSS Generator http://kematzy.com/blueprint-generator/
2. Google Groups http://groups.google.com/group/blueprintcss

Rubinius For Ruby Developers

At Ruby Conf 07, Evan Phoenix the project lead for rubini.us gave a great talk about rubini.us vm. The key takeaway for myself, was ability to contribute to the language using the language itself.

What an obvious concept right? Use Ruby to make Ruby. Unfortunately this has not been the case with any implementation the Matz Ruby Implementation(MRI), JRuby, or Iron Ruby using C, Java, and C#, respectively. Most languages need a way to bootstrap itself, but MRI has still not shed it’s shackles of it’s C implementation.

Another concept, that this project has pushed forward with, is that the language should have an executable spec (using a rspec compatible suite). Now if certain aspects of the language seem to behave in a peculiar way, you can now look up the spec and see if ruby code is producing the desired behavior. This will hopefully drive an increase in development towards Ruby.

An aside, while at tbe conference there was a push to define the specification. Even while, most of the core ruby developers are Japanese with limited English.

Read Phoenix

This was a fun and short (reference to the customer) project that showcases local blogs here in phoenix.

Check it out http://readphoenix.com!