Rails Custom ActionForm Helper - ruby-on-rails

I do not like the current date helper for action form and would like to replace it with something like the bootstrap datetime control.
I need to know the steps to write a custom actionform helper. I need this because I am looking to make this a modular solution for date/time control that I can use across projects -- and share with the world too, of course.
I am relatively new to ruby/rails and the whole DSL thing... so please try to explain a little of the magic to a long time c/java programmer.

Related

30Bees/Presta 1.6 shop translation in frontController

I am trying to add a few translations to the frontend of our module. When the translations are in the .tpl files they do get rendered. However no translation fields get shown in the backend my code for the .tpl files is:
{l s="Text" mod="myModule"}
I also do need to do some translating in the FrontControllers (mainly Error handling and feedback for serverside validation).
In the AdminController I simply use $this->l('Text'); which works. However, in the FrontController this is not available. I've checked the ControllerCore and FrontControllerCore, l() is not defined in those and only available in AdminController.
Can anyone give me a detailed explanation of what I need doing? All my research on the web always points to $this->l() being the thing to use...
When using translations in tpl files you need to use single quotes not double quotes.
{l s='Text' mod='myModule'}
As for front controllers... well if you're using custom module controllers as in controllers that extend ModuleFrontController you can use
$this->module->l('Text');
And if you're not using those controllers then... start using them.
Some things might be different since thirtybees is a fork of PrestaShop but I guess translation mechanism is the same.

Can I use url parameters in LESS css?

Intro:
I'm trying out LESS in an asp.net mvc environment.
I use dotless for server side processing (and I wouldn't want to use client side processing especially afer publishing the complete project).
I have to apply a design where there are different color schemes depending on different things (e.g. time of the day).
Less felt very powerful in this case as designing a parameterized css and only changing like 10 variables at the beginning of the file for every theme was really uplifting.
Problem:
But I would need to somehow change the color themes from an outside parameter.
Ideas:
First I thought that an URL parameter like style.less?theme=fuschia would be good, but I found no way to parse something like this.
Then I thought that making a very short blue.less, green.less, orange.less consisting only declared color variables, and including the main.less in every one of them would be a solid solution.
I had no chance to try out the second solution, but I thought this would be a good time to ask for advice on the most robust way of doing this.
The problem again is: I want to control some things in my less file from the outside.
Yes you can (because I implemented that feature for exactly that reason).
Dotless supports parameters from the outside via the querystring parameter.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.less?foo=bar" />
Will let you use the following less:
#foo = bar;
The parameter injection code is very simple. it just prepends the variable declarations to your normal less file, so anything that comes as a querystring parameter will follow the above syntax.
The code in question is very simple: https://github.com/dotless/dotless/blob/master/src/dotless.Core/Engine/ParameterDecorator.cs
AFAIK, you cannot pass parameters for dotnetless to use to do the compile.
As a suggestion, why not just call different less files? This would be fairly easy to do by using a Viewbag property.
To make the different less ones, You first create a less file with each set of colors in them. Then you import your base css file. dotnetless will merge the color definations in the parent file with the usages in the base file. So you have something like -
#baseGray: #ddd;
#baseGrayDark: darken(#baseGray, 15%);
#baseGrayLight: lighten(#baseGray, 10%);
#import "baseCss.less";
I just tested this on and MVC3 project and it works.

In Ruby, how can I inspect the class generated by a .html.erb template?

When doing J2EE development, I find it handy for debugging to view the Java classes that are generated by the JSP compiler.
How can I do the equivalent in Ruby? Since it is all in memory, it won't generate a file that I can view. I believe it's the ERB module that generates the corresponding object for a template, so how can I actually view the object? Can I drop a debugger statement somewhere and use rdb? Is there some configuration value I can tell it to dump the object definition? I'm using rails, in case that makes a difference.
I don't think rails generates a class for your view. It basically calls eval after processing the file. Or do you mean inspecting the erb object while it's parsing your template?
If it's the latter you can find erb.rb in lib\ruby\1.9.1 I'd imagine you could just drop a debugger statement throughout that file.
I always make a habit of adding the following to my views (layout) which allows me to inspect or debug the parameters being used by the view in question.
<%= debug(params) %>
This will format all the parameters in yaml and display them in a Hash format.
Have a look at the method in the source code to get a better understanding. SOURCE
There are some differences compared with the Java way due to language differences.
Most template libraries for Ruby follow these steps when compiling/optimizing:
The template is compiled into Ruby source code -- not a class but a long procedure that appends to a string buffer while traversing the logic of the original template.
This ruby code is evaluated in order to be bound for later reference, preferably within a method body. This way, it is only parsed once by the interpreter.
The method (or other context) containing the logic of the parsed template is invoked to render it.
Anyway, the compiled template code therefore looks a lot like a much noisier version of your original template, and will generally not help you debugging, unless you're debugging the template language itself.
Anyone interested in template language implementation might enjoy a look around the Tilt code (use different template languages with the same rendering interface and optimization), and Temple (a great template language meta-implementation).

Would you like ASP.NET MVC view engine in which a view is created entirely in Code?

Recently I created a spike of a view engine, in which views are plain classes, and the content is created by using funny using-scope blocks.
The code together with a simple sample site is available at http://code.google.com/p/sharp-view-engine/
Here I'd like to hear your opinions regarding such an idea. Is it completely weird or maybe someone likes it?
I would actually not like that.
I can agree with DSLs (such as a Parser-Combinator or for generating XML Nodes in a data-context), but in this case I think that too much is being put in code that. And, in the end, this just complicates boundaries and leads to hard-to-maintain code. (You can already do the same, but with more verbosity just using the "standard" Web Controls. You can always use {subblock} in C# to limit a variables scope.)
The approach I prefer to use is templates with bindings (but no "code in templates"). That makes it easy for the "designer" (hopefully not me, or the next person to come along and) edit the layout of the view how they see fit. However, the core logic (the available controls and bindings) are kept in the code -- uncluttered. (Another advantage with the templates is that if they externally housed they do not require a recompile for every little change.)
Simplicity and maintainability are like ... zen.
This is an interesting idea taken to the extreme I'd say. At my shop we're using html conventions for pretty much everything except our layout. The only real html we have in the project is our Spark master page. For generating the content itself we use a convention engine that that spits out a semantic html model. (We're using the HtmlTags library from FubuMVC to build the semantic model.)
An example convention for rendering a multiline text box looks like:
public static HtmlTag Build(ElementRequest req)
{
return Tags.TextArea
.Rows(6)
.Id(req.ElementId)
.Attr("name", req.ElementId)
.Text(req.StringValue());
}
These conventions get triggered from reflecting on the view model (or we can manually call them from a helper method). The output is rendered (via ToString()) into the content section of our master page. We're joking that pretty soon we won't even need a view engine.
ps here's how we handle nesting. (Your using blocks look cluttered!)
return Tags.Div.Nest(
Tags.Button("save").AddClass("positive"),
Tags.Span.Text(" or "),
Tags.Anchor.Text("cancel").AddClass("negative")
);
Nest() is an extension method that simply takes a params array of HtmlTag and appends them to the parent's children collection.

Autocomplete with Vim and Rails Datamapper

Is there a way that I can have auto completion in Vim after I load a model from the database?
So for example if I have a model of type Foo with an instance method of type bar and do the following
foo = Foo.first(:param=>'x')
foo.b
should show me bar as a possible auto complete value. I think that this is somewhat hard to accomplish with dynamic languages and you would probably have to be aware of the datamapper conventions.
Maybe I'm taking the wrong approach and should not be thinking using auto complete because there is an easier way to code?
I don't think it's possible to do semantic completion in VIM. However if you have written the instance name once, you could use the simple auto completion in VIM to avoid typing long names again.

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