It is in need of an update for Rails 2.1 so any help is appreciated.

It’s been fun and I’m enjoying BDD. Once I get the basics down I’ll get into RSpec stories too. Anyway, back to the point.

On my current project we are working on a new version of the most important feature of the site. Without it, everything else is crap. It’s the main driver for adding content and it needs to be rock solid, no, diamond solid. And being a newly minted RSpec user I wanted spec it all out, cover every angle, even add view specs. Here is where my noobness shines.

The new feature is in it’s own partial which is nested in another partial nested within a page. Pretty standard stuff. With the process for writing Rails views and partials in mind I set about trying to write nested view specs. That doesn’t work. AT ALL. The RSpec view docs talk about the expect_render and stub_render methods but I still couldn’t figure it out.

So I called google and still nothing really popped out until I saw an archived email chain where someone said just spec the partials. WTF? OK? So I added a new file to my specs: spec/views/my_view_folder/partial_name.html.erb_spec.rb, added the following, and waited for autotest to run. And you know what? That bastard ran. Maybe I’m just dense, or missed a paragraph somewhere, but an example of the right way to do partial specs would have been sweet. I hope this helps other unsuspecting noob.

Note: Just in case this genero code is confusing replace “my_view_folder” with the actual name of the view directory and “partial” with the actual partial name. And change ControllerHelper to be the name of the actual helper. You get that when you run the RSpec scaffold generator. I did that because I’m lazy and didn’t want to make all the spec files by hand.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the source to show how to do locals.

Resources I found useful

• http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/articles/2006/11/06/view-spec-tutorial
• http://rubypond.com/articles/2008/03/31/using-rspec-have_tag/
• http://errtheblog.com/posts/66-view-testing-20
• http://rspec.rubyforge.org/documentation/rails/writing/views.html

8:55 am Opening comments
8:57 am Our non-profit is Little Brother: Friends of the Elderly
12:07 pm Lunch break with a Rock Band challenge

There are some hard core Rock Band players here. I hope our rookie team can do well, and by that I mean not place last. I think we’ll do well. Here’s the band…

Vocals: Robert Fischer
Guitar: Nate Kadlac
Drums: Andy Tinkhan
Bass: Kathleen O’Brien, from Little brothers

So far we’re in 2nd place…

6:58 pm Dinner time. Mmmm Chipotle.

Here is the official flickr stream for the event >> Photo me, baby!

Notice how Team Ruby.mn is properly featured?

Alicia and Nate have created a sweet site design that just blows away Little Brother’s current site. Justin and I are hacking away at the CMS. Lars is maxing out his credit cards with the online donations. Andy has written a book of RSpec tests. And Coung and Robert are building the volunteer sign-up. Everything is still parts is parts but everything is progressing nicely.

8:17 pm Little Brothers brought in a surprise for us. We got a clown. No one else got a clown. We rule.

12:02 am Half way there. I’m tired.

12:32 am Domino’s Pizza just delivered. Why did I think it was a good idea?

3:27 am Sierra Bravo just gave out some raffle prizes. I won “The Ultimate MAtix Collection” in HD-DVD. I don’t have an HD-DVD player yet and someone just told me Blue-Ray won the format war so I got that going for me. Which is nice.

5:12 am Can’t. Speak. In. Complete… Sentences…

7:05 am I just noticed the sun in coming up. I’ve been awake for 25 hours now. So tired…

9:35 am The site looks sweet. We’re just putting on the final touches and preparing for our demo.

9:44 am Time for a photo check-in.

THIS IS NO PLACE FOR THE WEAK!

TEAM RUbY.mn hard at work.

10:51 am 1h 10 m left. Subversion commits are flying all over the place. Robert is also live blogging the end.

11:42 am Our final revision, number 161, was just checked in. Here are the stats for our project…

+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers          |   579 |   467 |      16 |      58 |   3 |     6 |
| Helpers              |    32 |    29 |       0 |       1 |   0 |    27 |
| Models               |   356 |   294 |      11 |      36 |   3 |     6 |
| Libraries            |   455 |   315 |       2 |      27 |  13 |     9 |
| Integration tests    |    46 |    40 |       1 |       2 |   2 |    18 |
| Functional tests     |   304 |   246 |      12 |      39 |   3 |     4 |
| Unit tests           |   242 |   201 |       7 |      31 |   4 |     4 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |  2014 |  1592 |      49 |     194 |   3 |     6 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
  Code LOC: 1105     Test LOC: 487     Code to Test Ratio: 1:0.4

After consulting google I came across Ted Hogan’s site. He explained that is was a permissions issue between “/usr/local/mysql/data” and the current logged in user. His fix is listed below.

You can get to this through the finder by using the “Go to Folder” dropdown item from the Finder’s “Go” menu. Just type in /usr/local and go from there. Also, you can modify the permissions by command-I (info dialog) at the bottom (Sharing & Permissions.) Be sure to click the options button (gear box at bottom) and select “Apply to enclosed items” as well.

One part nerd Olympics, one part community service project and one part race-against-the-clock — Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge presented by VISI will partner deserving Minnesota non-profits with teams of talented web developers for 24 hours of fun collaboration culminating in a fully operational website for each participating non-profit. - Sierra Bravo website

Here is the link to team Ruby.mn. I’m the one with the party hat.

The code is hosted at GitHub.

Here’s how to install the plug-in. (Rails 2.1 required for git plug-ins)

./script/plugin install git://github.com/sschroed/restful_ezm.git

Here’s how to run the generator.

For standard html views: ./script/generate messages erb
For haml[1] views: ./script/generate messages haml

[1] You will need to install the haml plug-in for the views to render properly.

I’ve tried to decouple as much of the code as I could with this release. If you used Easy_Messages you’ll remember most of the code was stuck in the plug-in directory. With REZM the generator will put a controller, helper, model, tests, and a few other support files right into your project for easy access. To see the entire list view the FILELIST in plugins/restful_easy_messages. There is still a tiny bit of code in the plug-in though.

If you are using Rick Olson’s RESTful_Authentication you can get REZM up and running with minimal setup as I pulled it from a project that uses it.

First, update the user model.

Then add the REZM routes.

NOTE: Routes have been changed in the lastest release on GitHub. The User is no longer needed. This break backwards compatibility, unfortunately. Thanks to Gravis for the update.

Now run db:migrate and you should be good to go.

But what if you didn’t use restful_authentication? Having to use Acts_As_Authenticated for EZM was the biggest complaint that I heard so I made REZM with hooks for you to switch out R_A if you want. Open lib\restful_easy_messages_controller_system.rb to do so. Just replace the current_user and login_required methods with calls to similar ones in your application.

I believe that is it. Oh wait, there is also an Atom feed for the inbox!

If you wish to try out REZM I’ve set up a sample app. You can message the user “sam” if you want to test writing a mesasge.

***** Click to play with the REZM Sample App. *****

Thanks to…

**Geoffrey Grosenbach for the REST PeepCode

**Matt Beedle for writing and releasing Acts_As_Emailable which was my starting point with Easy_Message and now RESTful_easy_messages.

** Rick Olson for writing and releasing all of his plug-ins.

** Dr. Nic Williams for his multiple-openids-per-user-sample-app which I used as a starting point for the REZM sample app which I’ll put up soon.

** Ben Curtis for his OpenID sample app which Dr. Nic based his.

Lastly, please recommend me if you like RESTful_Easy_Messages.

All I wanted was the syntax to loop through the nodes of an XML document. You’d think that would be easy to find.

WRONG!

My search lead me to many long winded dissertations on to use XML for web services or someone’s home grown SAX implementation but no simple syntax that wasn’t buried in 1000 lines of code. Seriously, who is going to read 1000 lines of code in a blog post?

Anyway, I’ve distilled it below. I know it’s simple. But, I couldn’t find simple. Maybe my google skillz are lacking.

This code assumes you have “customer” nodes within your XML document and each customer has an attribute called “name”.

I realize the above code reassigns nodeValue each time through the loop, but I just wanted to show the syntax for retrieving an attribute value.

Steps to install ImageMagick

1. Download the Windows binary of ImageMagick. I used ImageMagick-6.3.5-4-Q16-windows-dll.exe
2. Run the ImageMagick installer (The file you just downloaded) and accept the defaults.
3. Open a command prompt to verify the install was successful
4. Type >convert logo: logo.miff
5. Type >imdisplay logo.miff
6. If all went well with the install a little picture of blue wizard should appear.

Steps to install MiniMagick

1. Install the gem from the command prompt with the command gem install mini_magick. You may be asked to install a few required dependencies. Say yes.
2. Wait for the download and install to complete.

You should be good now to install attachment_fu, but that is beyond the scope of this article. Use the links below for more information

References:

• Mike Clark’s Tutorial
• Khamsouk Souvanlasy’s Ajax and attachment_fu
• Helpful hints with attachment_fu and Windows

Below are the installation instructions. This is my first Rails plug-in so let me know if you find something to refactor. I’m open to constructive criticism.

The code is hosted at RubyForge.

UPDATE I: I have created a new branch for 0.51, please use that one for the latest stable release

UPDATE II: I have removed the docs from branch 0.51 and placed them online here: http://easymessages.samuelschroeder.com. Now the generator should work like a charm

svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/easymessages/branches/RB-0.51

The run the generator to create the model, migration, helper, and views.

script/generate easy_messages message account

Note: Easy_Messages assumes you have Acts_As_Authenticated installed with the defaults of a model named User and a controller named Account. And you must use the above line exactly. I have grand aspirations of making the generator fully dynamic someday but for now you’ll have to deal.

The generator should produce this output.

exists app/models/
exists app/helpers/
exists app/views/account
create app/models/message.rb
create app/helpers/easy_messages_helper.rb
create app/views/account/message_view.rhtml
create app/views/account/messages.rhtml
create app/views/account/send_message.rhtml
exists db/migrate
create db/migrate/###_create_easy_messages_messages.rb

Yes, I realize the redundant naming but once/if I get the dynamic generator going it would say ###_create_easy_messages_[MessageClassNames]s.

Now you have to do three manual changes to your code. First, add “easy_messages” to apps/model/user.rb.

Second, add “authenticated_commands” to apps/controllers/account_controller.rb.

Finally, you need to copy the named routes from vendor/plugins/easy_messages/config/easy_messages_named_routes.rb to config/routes.rb.

That should be it for the setup. So start your development server and point your brower to..

http://localhost:3000/account/inbox

There is also a complete RDoc listing in vendor/plugins/easy_messages/doc

Thanks to…

**Matt Beedle for writing and releasing Acts_As_Emailable.

** Rick Olson for writing and releasing the kick-ass Acts_As_Authenticated plug-in. It was been such a help when starting new projects.

Then this morning everything went to hell and the very descriptive errors appeared and I spent a few hours googling and trying some of the Kbases at Microsoft. Nothing worked until I tried this which states the cause as…

The most probable cause for this error is that you must have installed Internet Information Services (IIS) after the installation of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

But remember I did do it in the right order. Right? To make a long boring story short I was messing around with adding and removing some Windows Components from the Add/Remove Programs wizard and sowhere along the line it must have reinstalled part of IIS. Either that or the Network Gnomes are back.