Entries from January 2010 ↓

A quick note on how to delete a tag from a remote git repository:

git push github :refs/tags/my_tag

Just a quick post to say that I will be slowly releasing the ruby gems used at SonicIQ over the next few weeks/months. The first (more to test the workflow of Jewler/Gemcutter/Github than anything), is IQ::HTML.

IQ::HTML is a super simple gem with a few helpers for creating html markup much like you’ll see in ActionPack, however this is it’s only task and is therefore useful when you don’t want the extra weight of ActionPack.

Next up will be IQ::Form which currently exists on Github but is undergoing significant changes so I would suggest waiting for the new release.

I have just had my sexy validations patch excepted into Rails. Much thanks to José Valim for helping me get this applied.

The reason for the name “sexy validations” is that it gives a much more concise way of defining validation and reusing custom validator classes. Much like what sexy migrations did for defining your database schema.

Simple example of using existing Rails validations, the “sexy” way:

class Film < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :title, :presence => true, :uniqueness => true, :length => { :maximum => 100 }
  validates :budget, :presence => true, :length => { :within => 1..10000000 }
end

The power of the “validates” method comes though, when using in conjunction with custom validators:

class IntenseFilmTitleValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    record.errors[attribute] << "must start with 'The'" unless =~ /^The/
  end
end
 
class SpendValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    spend = case options[:size]
      when :big then 100000000
      when :small then 100000
    end
    record.errors[attribute] << "must not exceed #{spend}" if value > spend
  end
end
 
class Film < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :title, :presence => true, :intense_film_title => true
  validates :budget, :spend => { :size => :big } # using custom options
end

All validations in Rails, along with other common model functionality have been extracted into ActiveModel, so you can also use validations and Validator classes without ActiveRecord e.g.

class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    record.errors[attribute] << (options[:message] || "is not an email") unless
      value =~ /^([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})$/i
  end
end
 
class Person
  include ActiveModel::Validations
  attr_accessor :name, :email
 
  validates :name, :presence => true, :length => { :maximum => 100 }
  validates :email, :presence => true, :email => true
end

Have fun!

Was just transferring my Feedburner account for this blog and clicked the “Item Use” link under “Analyze”, got an interesting message:

I think more web apps should introduce sarcasm, it definitely brightened up my day.