Random Rails Notes

This page features random Ruby on Rails snibbets that I have come to rely upon for various goals.

link_to_function

Need to create a link that simply calls a javascript function? Here’s the way I do it:

link_to_function "Hello", "alert('hi')"

Simple enough, huh?

ActionMailer SSL

I was getting STARTTLS errors:

lost connection after STARTTLS

I added this to my ActionMailer configuration:

:openssl_verify_mode => 'none'

In another instance, I simply turned off tls in my Postfix configuration.

Sorting / Ordering ActiveRecord Results

Here’s a simple example for descending the order:

@memories = Memory.where(:user_id => @current_user.id).limit(25).find(:all, :order => "date DESC")

Render Partial to a String in Rails 3

Rails prior to 3 had the h and the html_safe helper functions. In Rails 3, achieving the goal of these functions is done differently, as it seems that Rails 3 makes everything “safe”. This is all well and good, but today when I tried to render a partial to a string within a helper function, then return the resulting string to a template for output, the HTML entities had already been escaped.

To avoid this, I searched for “rails 3 render scape” and found a post at StackOverflow. It explained the raw method, and suggested using it within the partial. That didn’t work for me, as I explained:

This helped me, thank you. In my case, I render the partial directly from another template, as well from a helper which is called by a different template. Also, my partial is a form, so I didn't want to call raw for every string output. It works!

I use this syntax when calling the helper:

<%= raw(link_to_add_group_or_alt(@user.id)) %>

xml:space=”preserve”

Thanks to XML Please:

<%= form.text_area(:profile, "xml:space" => "preserve") %>

For this XSL / XML note, see also:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5366230/how-can-i-override-rails-3-unobtrusive-javascript-functions-without-modifying-the

and:

<xsl:template match="@xml:space" />