April 30, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Have problems testing methods that query ActiveRecord?

Sometimes you’ll run into a problem that won’t reveal an answer.  I ran into a problem I had come across before in that past to which I knew I hadn’t really solved.  I have a custom method that looks up an ActiveRecord query and makes a change.  But both times I’ve tried to test the…

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April 8, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

ActiveRecord vs Me… Round 1 – FIGHT!

I’ve done a fair bit of work in creating a library that integrates with ActiveRecord Objects.  I also have a pretty good grasp on mixins/inheritance.  Yet I still run into situations where trying include, extend, and techniques for monkey patching just don’t work out. I was trying to implement a method like first_or_create on the…

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March 31, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Rails 4’s Awesome enums

In Rails 4 enum was introduced to support a feature that people were building by hand or by gem.  What enum does for you is it associates a symbol list for you to reference which will be stored in the database as an integer.  So :cow could be 0 and :dog could be 1 in…

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February 6, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Getting Into Rails Model Queries

For the longest time I was stubborn against learning “database programming”.  It was the abhorrent syntax that made me so resistant.  But low and behold there came Rails who found it in their heart to make a middle man ActiveRecord in which to slay the evil abhorrent syntax by resolving all good details in more…

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