Yurii Rashkovskii's Blog

I wish to save your time, if you use RSpec 0.7.3. You might find your tests failing with something like “Failed to convert nil to String”. Yeah, unobvious problem. I’ve spent some time examining sources and then I’ve found rspec guys have already fixed this problem, thanks to their bug tracker.

cattr_accessor :fixture_path, :use_transactional_fixtures, :use_instantiated_fixtures

just after

 
  class EvalContext < Test::Unit::TestCase
 

in spec/spec_helper.rb

should work as a workaround until new RSpec is released.

Hope I’ve saved your time!

If you have an Ajax form (like in Ajaxscaffold) and you want to attach 1+ files to object you edit, you can follow my path (I don’t guarantee it is a shortest path):

• Setup upload_progress and respond_to_parent plugins

• Define your upload_status action:

 
    def upload_status
        render :nothing
    end
 

• Outside of your AJAX form (in the case of Ajaxscaffold, after closing form tag in _new_edit.rhtml), setup an upload form in a partial (in _binary_file.rhtml)

 
  <%= render :partial => 'binary_file', :locals => { :obj => @obj } %>
 

• _binary_file.rhtml:

 
  <div id="upload-box">
    <%= form_tag_with_upload_progress({ :action => 'upload_file' }) %>
                  <%= hidden_field 'obj_id', obj.id %>
        Select file to upload: <%= file_field_tag 'obj_file' %>
        <%= submit_tag "Upload" %>
    </form>
  </div>
 

• In your controller, define upload_file action:

 
    def upload_file
        bf = BinaryFile.create :uploaded_file => params[:obj_file]
        @obj = Obj.find(params[:obj_id])
        responds_to_parent do
            render :update do |page|
                page.replace_html "upload-box", 
                                              :partial => "binary_file",
                                             :locals => { :obj => @obj,  
                                                          :binary_file => bf }
            end
      end
    end
 

• In _form.rhtml (form file for Ajaxscaffold or wherever your form content is available):

 
   <%= hidden_field 'obj', 'datafile_id' %>
 

• In _binary_file.rhtml:

 
       <% if obj.datafile %>
    <%= javascript_tag "$('obj_datafile_id').value=#{obj.datafile.id};" %>
    <%= link_to "File",
        { :controller => "binary_files", :action => "show", :id => ob.datafile.id }, 
        { :target => "_blank" } %>
       <% else %>
    <%= javascript_tag "$('obj_datafile_id').value=#{binary_file.id};" %>
    <%= link_to "File",
        { :controller => "binary_files", :action => "show", :id => binary_file.id }, 
        { :target => "_blank" } %>
      <% end %> 

• Right now you have your binary files after Update and Cancel actions, which looks bad. You might want to use the following trick:
  • Find your form footer (should be

    <p class="form-footer">

    for Ajaxscaffold) and kill it or set display: none in its style.
  • Then, create your own form footer after rendering binary_file partial(s). Here you are an Ajaxscaffold example:

 
     <p class="form-footer">
          <%= submit_to_remote Inflector.titleize(@options[:action]), "Update",
        :url => @options.merge(:controller => @scaffold_controller),
                    :loading => "Element.show('#{loading_indicator_id(@options)}'); Form.disable('#{element_form_id(@options)}');",
                    :html => { :href => url_for(@options.merge(:controller => @scaffold_controller)),
                               :id => element_form_id(@options)+'submission_helper' },
                    :submit => element_form_id(@options) %>
          <% cancel_params = @options.merge(:controller => @scaffold_controller, :action => 'cancel'+@suffix, :referring_action => @options[:action]) %>
          <%= link_to_remote "Cancel",
            { :url => cancel_params,
            :confirm => "Your changes will be lost. Continue?",
              :loading => "Element.show('#{loading_indicator_id(@options)}');" },
          { :href => url_for(cancel_params) } %>
          <%= loading_indicator_tag @options %>
        </p>
 

That’s all, folks!

P.S. I haven’t re-checked this extraction yet. Please comment if you will find something missing or unobvious. Thank you.

P.P.S. I know that it could be refactored to make all this stuff nicer. I’ll do that when I will have another free minute.

P.P.P.S. I have removed actual upload progress consciously in my example. However, it shouldn’t be a big problem to enable it again.

We’re continuing getting rid of old ideas and projects that we have abandoned (due to lack of time or real interest).

I’m glad to present a C code that Jeff Szuhay has written for us that is intended to return USB stick manufacturer, product name and a serial number, something like:

 
GetManufacturerString("/Volumes/TSONIC") => "Transcend" 
GetProductString("/Volumes/TSONIC") => "T.sonic 610 " 
GetSerialNumber("/Volumes/TSONIC") => "FFFFFFFFFFFFFF"  // fake serial
 

Owning this code is not important for us anymore. Sync2Stick project was abandoned for few monthes now, and I think it is much better to share our minor investments, since they don’t generate any profit for us.

This code is MacOSX-specific. I have found that sometimes it fails to do its job under certain circumstances, but generally it works “just fine” and I hope it will be useful for somebody, at least for learning low-level MacOSX issues.

Download it!

P.S. I would like to recommend Jeff Szuhay as a very experienced Mac developer. However, I’m not sure he is doing freelance currently.

After two months of improving a concept we sadly came to an understanding that while idea was interesting and we’ve got numerous excitements, Basecamp serves bad as a Content Management System back-end.

We’re going to release our considerations and code that could be interesting to public soon.

Anyway, Frontcamp project was not a waste of time. We’ve done lots of interesting investigations on a modern content management, we’ve released Caches.rb plugin.

We’re full of new ideas. We’re experimenting. One of projects we’re hacking now is hereBy, an easy-to-use online tool for contract authoring.