…no, not because it leaves a bitter aftertaste, I’m talking about the Pickle step definitions for Cucumber.

I have lately been using Pickle when writing Cucumber features, however I have come to the conclusion that this is a bad idea. The reason being that when using Pickle, you create entries directly, whereas the whole point of Cucumber is that it is for high level integration testing.

What I do now, is to create any entries by filling out and submitting the relevant forms with a step definition, for example I may have the following:

Given an admin has created the following products
  | Name    | Variants                                  | Featured |
  | T-Shirt | Small: 10.99, Medium: 12.99, Large: 14.99 | Yes      |
  | Keyring | Default: 2.99                             | Yes      |

I would then write a step definition for this that would log in as the admin user, break this table appart and fill in the relevant forms.

I would go so far as to say that using factories at all in features is a bad idea and instead everything should happen via the user interface for better coverage. For any data that is known to exist when the app is deployed via ‘rake db:seed’, this can be loaded in the ‘env.rb’ file e.g.

load 'seeds.rb'

Update 11/2/2010: Sometimes this is simply not practical due to slowdown which is a shame, as noted by Amos in the comments.

I’ve had a set of rather bespoke requirements for authentication on a recent project and thought I’d give Devise a go.

Devise uses Warden, which is an authentication solution build on Rack making it extremely flexible and usable across multiple frameworks e.g. Rails/Sinatra. Also, Devise is extremely modular meaning to can easily write custom “strategies” for specific behaviour.

I have used Clearance in the past which is great if you want an engine that will just work. Devise however is by far the most flexible and extensible solution that I have come across with the same ease of use as Clearance. The only thing that you don’t get with devise that you do with Clearance is the signup stage, however as this is normally custom on a per-app basis I can live with this.

One more thing to note is that Devise lets you have multiple auth systems in play e.g. one for users and one for admins.

Myself and a colleague have just managed to waste away a good couple of hours trying to figure out Autotests strange ’style’ mechanism to add the ability to “test in the way Jay Fields explains”:http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/09/rails-how-we-test.html using “UnitRecord”:http://unit-test-ar.rubyforge.org/.

You can grab our plugin to enable “UnitRecord”:http://unit-test-ar.rubyforge.org/ when using “Autotest”:http://rubyforge.org/projects/zentest below:

“http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/plugins/iq_autotest”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/plugins/iq_autotest

By default, running autotest in the Rails directory will run the unit tests. To run the functional tests, do: AUTOTEST='functional' autotest

I hope this saves some people some time!!

We are looking for a Ruby on Rails, XHTML & CSS Developer to join our team at “SonicIQ”:http://soniciq.com. Head over to “43folders job board to view our ad”:http://jobs.43folders.com/job/6a5255713e8351a5eb2efef7805b7629/?d=1.

These are exiting times with projects like “Propel’r”:http://propelr.com in the pipeline, along with the ever-growing opportunities for new and interesting client projects.

If you are a highly motivated developer and can see yourself in a Ruby on Rails position in sunny (sometimes) Bournemouth, UK then “apply at 43folders”:http://jobs.43folders.com/job/6a5255713e8351a5eb2efef7805b7629/?d=1.

To view the coverage of your plugins using Rcov, first install the rcov gem with sudo gem install rcov, then copy and paste the following onto the end of the Rakefile inside your plugin directory:

require 'rcov/rcovtask'
 
desc 'Measures test coverage using rcov'
namespace :rcov do
  desc 'Output unit test coverage of plugin.'
  Rcov::RcovTask.new(:unit) do |rcov|
    rcov.pattern    = 'test/unit/**/*_test.rb'
    rcov.output_dir = 'rcov'
    rcov.verbose    = true
  end
 
  desc 'Output functional test coverage of plugin.'
  Rcov::RcovTask.new(:functional) do |rcov|
    rcov.pattern    = 'test/functional/**/*_test.rb'
    rcov.output_dir = 'rcov'
    rcov.verbose    = true
  end
end

You can now simply run rake rcov from inside your plugin directory which will generate an rcov directory with the results. Open rcov/index.html (if you are on OSX this will open automatically) in a browser to view the results.

Thanks to “Mike Clark”:http://clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom for his “Rcov rake task for Rails”:http://clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/2007/01/05#RcovRakeTask which this task is based on.

*Update (11-11-08):* Changed code to use the RcovTask class.

John Nunemaker posted a handy tip on “setting up autotest to work with Growl”:http://railstips.org/2007/7/23/autotest-growl-pass-fail-notifications

I use this all the time now however I didn’t like the ugly smilies (call me shallow if you like). I used “Wolfgang Bartelme’s”:http://bartelme.at “Smily Devkit”:http://bartelme.at/journal/archive/smiley_devkit to make a couple of PNG’s slightly more pleasing to the eye.

p=. !http://thelucid.com/files/fail.png(Autotest Fail image)!
!http://thelucid.com/files/pending.png(Autotest Pending image)!
!http://thelucid.com/files/pass.png(Autotest Pass image)!

The zip file can be downloaded here: “autotest_images.zip”:http://thelucid.com/files/autotest_images.zip

*Update* 17-08-07: Added ‘pending’ image for RSpec as requested by Aslak Hellesoy

Following my previous post, below is a modified version of “John Nunemaker’s ‘Renaming RHTML to ERB’”:http://railstips.org/2007/3/4/renaming-rhtml-to-erb to take into account the format in the extension, and handle “the RJS issues I was having”:http://www.thelucid.com/articles/2007/05/16/rails-edge-view-file-extention-functionality-has-changed.

namespace 'views' do
  desc 'Renames all .rhtml views to .html.erb, .rjs to .js.rjs, .rxml to .xml.builder and .haml to .html.haml'
  task 'rename' do
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rhtml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rhtml$/, '.html.erb')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rjs').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rjs$/, '.js.rjs')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rxml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rxml$/, '.xml.builder')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.haml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.haml$/, '.html.haml')}`
    end
  end
end

h4. Update

Added haml conversion.

It seems that on edge revision 6502 and later, the way that view file extensions has changed considerably.

I couldn’t work out why my tests were breaking when doing an xhr request to a new action which had a respond_to block setup for both html and js. It was returning the html instead of the rjs??

It turns out (after tearing my hair out for over three hours) that “Changeset 6499″:http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6499 changes things in such a way that the normal new.rjs naming will not get picked up on an xhr request, you now need to add the request format to the extension before the template type i.e. new.js.rjs

This seemed a little odd at first but I am guessing it means you could have a new.js.erb file which is pretty cool as you could achieve the same as “Dan Webb’s MinusR plugin”:http://www.danwebb.net/2006/11/17/rjs-minus-r.

What does seem a little odd is that a new.rjs will get picked up if you don’t give a respond_to at-all (I don’t know if this is a “feature” or a bug).

I’m am hoping that this may save someone some time.

“Dan Benjamin”:http://hivelogic.com/authors/danbenjamin recently updated his very helpful article entitled “”Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx”.

I don’t know about anyone else but compiling software is not one of my favourite pastimes. As I’ve been chopping and changing macs lately I thought I’d write a couple of shell scripts to get things right before running anything on my nice new (freshly installed) MacBook Pro.

h3. Prerequisites

There are a couple of prerequisites in addition to what’s on Dan’s “”What’s Needed”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx” list before running “the scripts”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/. The first is that you must have MySQL installed as referenced in “Dan’s article”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx, and the second being the following:

Ensure you have the following line at the end of your ~/.bash_login file:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

You can add this by typing nano ~/.bash_login then copy and paste the above line into the end of the file. Once this is done, hit ctrl-x to exit, answering ‘y’ to “do you want to save changes” prompt.

h3. The scripts

There are two scripts, “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh and “02_osx_image_tools.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/02_osx_image_tools.sh and the following will explain how to use them.

h3. Creating your development environment

The first script will install everything in Dan’s article along with the following gems that I use frequently:
* rails version 1.1.6 for support of older rails apps
* bluecloth
* redcloth
* sqlite3-ruby
* ferret
* ZenTest
* redgreen

Right… here we go:

(please read “the licence”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/MIT-LICENCE before running these scripts as although they have been tested on a clean install of Tiger, I can’t take any responsibility if something breaks)
# Download “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh to your desktop
# If you don’t wish to install all of these gems then open the file in a text editor and comment out the relevant lines with a hash.
# Open a new terminal window and type the following:

cd ~/Desktop
sh 01_osx_rails.sh

# Go make a cup of tea and watch all the pretty text scroll before your eyes.

That’s it, you should now have a fully working development environment.

h3. Image tools

I use a couple of image tools on my system, GD and ImageMagick (with RMagick). If you wish to install these tools and the related libraries, run the following:

(This script hasn’t been tested as much as the previous one so use at your own risk. If anyone has any bug fixes then please post a comment)

cd ~/Desktop
sh 02_osx_image_tools.sh

h3. We’re done

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious.

I hope this helps anyone else out there with Compilaphobia!

Last Friday, a couple of us from “SonicIQ”:http://www.soniciq.com went to the first “RoR eXchange hosted by Skills Matter”:http://www.skillsmatter.com/rorexchange.

It was a great day with some interesting talks from:

* Chad Fowler
* Tom Locke
* Paul Battley
* James Cox
* Damien Tanner
* Ben Griffiths
* Eleanor McHugh

h3. Chad Fowler – Quick and -Dirty- Clean: Well factored Rails

Chad kicked off with a talk on “Quick and -Dirty- Clean: Well factored Rails”. For me it was one of those talks where you think “If only I heard this 6 months ago!”. The reason I say this is that a great deal of what he was talking about, we now implement on a day-to-day basis, but we have gotten there the hard way through making the mistakes that he mentions.

He talks about never using instance variables in views, I love that someone has confirmed this as I find it generally bad practice. For a while now we have been replacing them with helpers giving much more flexibility when the controller logic changes.

One great point that was made, was that SQL should never be used in controllers, not even in rder options. I have to admit, in the past I have done this a lot but the suggestion of custom finders in the model are a much better alternative and it keeps with the whole “Skinny Controller, Fat Model”:http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/skinny-controller-fat-model idea.

One thing I really must get into the habit of using are association proxies for has_many and such like. Chad showed some great examples of this.

I like one phrase that Chad came up with… “Bare Model Finds” which made me chuckle. What he was getting at was something like an account based site where everything should be found via the given account i.e. @account.projects.find(:all)

as opposed to a "Bare Model Find" of Project.find(:all, :conditions => ['account_id = ?', @account.id])

The main points I have taken away from this talk (which I am also going to put in a large poster on the office wall) are the folowing:

* No instance variables in views
* No SQL in controllers
* No more than 4 lines in controller actions

h3. Tom Locke - Experiments with Very Rapid Development in Rails

Tom gave a demo of his "Hobo":http://hobocentral.net/blog/ project which is very similar to a plugin we use in-house (which also may go open source at some point).

One thing I like about Hobo is the incremental nature of the "dryml" views, meaning that you can override certain elements in a default view bit-by-bit, i.e. if you just want a different header for a certain page you don't need to create a duplicate of the view and change it, you only need to redefine certain elements of the page.

I completely agree with Tom's views on generators, although he was slightly more diplomatic than I would have been. I am going to be slightly controversial and say that I really don't like generators except for creating stub files. What happens if you have an authentication system generator which you have used in 50 projects and you suddenly find a security hole?? ...You now have to go back through those 50 projects to fix it! [end generator rant]

h3. Paul Battley - Rerouting Rails

Paul attempted to explain how he believes the rails routing system should be re-written. I could see a lot of merit in what he was saying, however I don't believe it lent itself very well to this type of presentation.

h3. James Cox - Managing a high performance rails app without tearing your hair out

James gave some great tips on easy ways to increase the overall performance of Rails apps. We are in the process of configuring a new server so these tips came at a good time.

h3. Damien Tanner - Extend your Rails application using Domain Specific Languages

Damien explained a roundtrip his company went on with DLS's explaining that they are great in certain situations but can be taken too far or overused. In the example he gave, it turned out that the DSL he created was overkill for the business problem he was trying to solve.

h3. Ben Griffiths - Are your tests working for you?

For me, this and Chad's were the presentations that made the trip to London worth while. I am ashamed to say that until now, I have not gotten into TDD (I've been using Rails for over a year and a half). It's not through lack of trying but with clients constantly on your back to get projects out the door, it's all to easy to dive straight into coding the application and neglecting the tests.

He started with a comparison between testing and the film Predator. This sounds like a strange comparison however it really helped to illustrate the need for a good set of tests.

My main problem with tests were "what do I test?" and "my fixtures need too much maintenance!". I breathed a sigh of relief when Ben suggested not using fixtures at all as maintaining a load of fixtures really turned me off testing.

This was a great talk and I could bang on for hours on the benefits of testing with Ben's techniques and his whole take on modular design but I'll save that for another post. As a side-note, I have been doing TDD ever since this talk.

h3. Eleanor McHugh - Where's my SQL? Platform-independent database design using Migrations

Eleanor gave some examples of how migrations could be extended with plugins. A lot of the examples she gave were based on what has been implemented in Hobo. There were some interesting points in the talk although my concentration levels were frayed by this point.

h3. Group Discussion

The main point of discussion was views. I think everyone was in agreement that something needs to change with the way Rails handles it's views. I personally believe that they should be purposefully limiting so that it is hard to do bad things in the view. I am looking forward to seeing views taken to the next level and believe that there will be some large changes before 2.0 based on the comments during this discussion.

h3. After Party

The guys at "Skills Matter":http://www.skillsmatter.com put on the first 100 drinks at "Liquid" - a Japanese-themed bar. We had a chance to mingle and discuss a few of the points that we forgot to ask after the talks.

Thanks to all the speakers, all in all a great day out.

Videos of some of the talks are now "available online":http://skillsmatter.com/menu/479. Also, my colleague "Andy":http://darkliquid.co.uk has blogged about his take on the day: "Part 1":http://darkliquid.co.uk/2007/2/10/ruby-on-rails-exchange, "Part 2":http://darkliquid.co.uk/2007/2/11/ruby-on-rails-exchange-part-2.