rails

Rails has and belongs to many (habtm) demystified

Posted by Michael on October 27, 2008 in CSS, Programming, Ruby Language

Every time I have to implement a many-to-many relationship between Rails models, I seem to have to figure out how to do it effectively all over again. Especially as Rails seems to evolve the relational hooks with better support and elegance. Here, I will show a has_and_belongs_to_many strategy that works well for me. Along the way, I’ll expose a few other minor tricks, such as adding a custom inflector for pluralizing your model or not adding the ID column on a table declaration.

DRYing your Views

Posted by Michael on July 5, 2008 in General, Ruby Language, SQL

Let me start out by saying that I am finally beginning to understand a bit about that magical Ruby block notion and how implementing methods through block passing can really empower you as a Ruby developer. Thanks to, a most excellent Ruby tutorial, I am definitely feeling a good bit more empowered about getting [...]

A model-free wizard

Posted by Michael on May 13, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language

Maybe I’m taking the whole MVC thing too far, but I’ve been reading and learning both Ruby and Rails at a fairly fast clip and just when I thought I was getting the hang of what goes in models, views, and controllers respectively, along comes The Advanced Recipe for Rails book with a recipe for [...]