So I've done a couple of days worth of research on the matter, and the general consensus is that there isn't one. So I was hoping for an answer more specific to my situation...
I'm using Rails to import a file into a database. Everything is working regarding the import, but I'm wanting to give the database itself an attribute, not just every entry. I'm creating a hash of the file, and I figured it'd be easiest to just assign it to the database (or the class).
I've created a class called Issue (and thus an 'issues' database) with each entry having a couple of attributes. I was wanting to figure out a way to add a class variable (at least, that's what I think is the best option) to Issue to simply store the hash. I've written a rake to import the file, iff the new file is different than the previous file imported (read, if the hash's are different).
desc "Parses a CSV file into the 'issues' database"
task :issues, [:file] => :environment do |t, args|
md5 = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(args[:file])
puts "1: Issue.md5 = #{Issue.md5}"
if md5 != Issue.md5
Issue.destroy_all()
#import new csv file
CSV.foreach(args[:file]) do |row|
issue = {
#various attributes to be columns...
}
Issue.create(issue)
end #end foreach loop
Issue.md5 = md5
puts "2: Issue.md5 = #{Issue.md5}"
end #end if statement
end #end task
And my model is as follows:
class Issue < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :md5
##md5 = 5
def self.md5
##md5
end
def self.md5=(newmd5)
##md5 = newmd5
end
attr_accessible #various database-entry attributes
end
I've tried various different ways to write my model, but it all comes down to this. Whatever I set the ##md5 in my model, becomes a permanent change, almost like a constant. If I change this value here, and refresh my database, the change is noted immediately. If I go into rails console and do:
Issue.md5 # => 5
Issue.md5 = 123 # => 123
Issue.md5 # => 123
But this change isn't committed to anything. As soon as I exit the console, things return to "5" again. It's almost like I need a .save method for my class.
Also, in the rake file, you see I have two print statements, printing out Issue.md5 before and after the parse. The first prints out "5" and the second prints out the new, correct hash. So Ruby is recognizing the fact that I'm changing this variable, it's just never saved anywhere.
Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.2.6, SQLite3 3.6.20.
tl;dr I need a way to create a class variable, and be able to access it, modify it, and re-store it.
Fixes please? Thanks!
There are a couple solutions here. Essentially, you need to persist that one variable: Postgres provides a key/value store in the database, which would be most ideal, but you're using SQLite so that isn't an option for you. Instead, you'll probably need to use either redis or memcached to persist this information into your database.
Either one allows you to persist values into a schema-less datastore and query them again later. Redis has the advantage of being saved to disk, so if the server craps out on you you can get the value of md5 again when it restarts. Data saved into memcached is never persisted, so if the memcached instance goes away, when it comes back md5 will be 5 once again.
Both redis and memcached enjoy a lot of support in the Ruby community. It will complicate your stack slightly installing one, but I think it's the best solution available to you. That said, if you just can't use either one, you could also write the value of md5 to a temporary file on your server and access it again later. The issue there is that the value then won't be shared among all your server processes.
Related
This is using Rails 4.2.0, Ruby 2.2.0.
What I'd like to do is use the data contained in a fixture object to verify that duplicates are caught before insertion into the same database:
test "identical entries should be impossible to create" do
dup_entry = Entry.new(entries(:test_entry))
assert_not dup_entry.save
end
(where Entry is a well-defined model with a controller method .new, and test_entry is a fixture containing some valid Entry instance.)
Unfortunately, this doesn't work because entries(:test_entry) is going to be an Entry, not a hash accepted by Entry.new.
I know that I can access fixture properties with an expression of the form fixture_objname.property in the associated tests, since whatever is specified in the YAML will automatically be inserted into the database and loaded. The problem with this is that I have to manually retype a bunch of property names for the object I just specified in the YAML, which seems silly.
The documentation also says I can get the actual model instances by adding self.use_instantiated_fixtures = true to the test class. However, there don't seem to be any instance_methods that will dump out the fixture's model instance (test_entry) in a hash format to feed back into the .new method.
Is there an idiomatic way to get what I want, or a different, easier way?
I believe you're looking for something like:
entries(:test_entry).attributes
entries(:test_entry).attributes.class # => Hash
You can also remove properties if needed:
entries(:admin).attributes.except("id")
Hope this helps.
I am trying to create a section in my app where a user can update certain site wide attributes. An example is a sales tax percent. Even though this amount is relatively constant, it does change every few years.
Currently I have created a Globals model with attributes I want to keep track of. For example, to access these attributes where needed, I could simply do something like the following snippet.
(1+ Globals.first.sales_tax) * #item.total
What is the best way to handle variables that do not change often, and are applied site wide? If I use this method is there a way to limit the model to one record? A final but more sobering question.......Am I even on the right track?
Ok, so I've dealt with this before, as a design pattern, it is not the ideal way to do things IMO, but it can sometimes be the only way, especially if you don't have direct disk write access, as you would if deployed on Heroku. Here is the solution.
class Global < ActiveRecord::Base
validate :only_one
private
def only_one
if Global.count >= 1
errors.add :base, 'There can only be one global setting/your message here'
end
end
end
If you DO have direct disk access, you can create a YAML config file that you can read/write/dump to when a user edits a config variable.
For example, you could have a yaml file in config/locales/globals.yml
When you wanted to edit it, you could write
filepath = "#{Rails.root}/config/locales/globals.yml"
globals = YAML.load(File.read("#{Rails.root}/config/locales/globals.yml"))
globals.merge!({ sales_tax: 0.07 })
File.write(filepath) do |f|
f.write YAML.dump(globals)
end
More on the ruby yaml documentation
You could also use JSON, XML, or whatever markup language you want
It seems to me like you are pretty close, but depending on the data structure you end up with, I would change it to
(1+ Globals.last.sales_tax) * #item.total
and then build some type of interface that either:
Allows a user to create a new Globals object (perhaps duplicating the existing one) - the use case here being that there is some archive of when these things changed, although you could argue that this should really be a warehousing function (I'm not sure of the scope of your project).
Allows a user to update the existing Globals object using something like paper_trail to track the changes (in which case you might want validations like those presented by #Brian Wheeler).
Alternatively, you could pivot the Global object and instead use something like a kind or type column to delineate different values so that you would have:
(1+ Globals.where(kind: 'Colorado Sales Tax').last) * #item.total
and still build interfaces similar to the ones described above.
You can create a create a class and dump all your constants in it.
For instance:
class Global
#sales_tax = 0.9
def sales_tax
#sales_tax
end
end
and access it like:
Global.sales_tax
Or, you can define global variables something on the lines of this post
In my model I have:
class Log < ActiveRecord::Base
serialize :data
...
def self.recover(table_name, row_id)
d = Log.where(table_name: table_name, row_id: row_id).where("log_type != #{symbol_to_constant(:delete)}").last
row = d.data
raise "Nothing to recover" if d.nil?
raise "No data to recover" if d.data.nil?
c = const_get(table_name)
ret = c.create(row.attributes)
end
And in my controller I calling it as:
def index
Log.recover params[:t], params[:r]
redirect_to request.referer
end
The problem is, if I access this page for the first time, I am getting error specified below, but after refresh, is everything OK. Where can be problem?
undefined method `attributes' for #<String:0x00000004326fc8>
In data column are saved instances of models. For the first time column isn't properly unserialized, it's just yaml text. But after refresh everything is fine. That's confusing, what is wrong? Bug in rails?
It's not every time, sometimes in first access everything is okey.
Deyamlizing an object of class Foo will do funny things if there is no class Foo. This can quite easily happen in development becauses classes are only loaded when needed and unloaded when rails thinks they might have changed.
Depending on whether the class is loaded or not the YAML load will have different results (YAML doesn't know about rail's automatic loading stuff)
One solution worth considering is to store the attributes hash rather than the activerecord object. You'll probably avoid problems in the long run and it will be more space efficient in the long wrong - there's a bunch of state in an activerecord object that you probably don't care about in this case.
If that's not an option, your best bet is probably to make sure that the classes that the serialized column might contain are loaded - still a few calls to require_dependency 'foo' at the top of the file.
Lets say that on top of my Rails app there is a bar with piece of text displayed - latest hot deal, scheduled downtime notfication, something like that. It's a single, on of a kind information that needs to be accessed on basically every request, and may be updated from time to time. What is the best way to achieve this?
What I'd like to do is some kind of permanent global variable (accessible from controllers).
It will be updated very rarely, so there's no problem if for some time after update there will be an inconsistency between workers.
On the other hand, it should be persistent in case of server fault (periodic backup is enough).
It will be accessed really often, so it should be as fast as possible - preferably stay in memory.
Also, it's only one of a kind, so I'd really prefer not to bloat the app with a dedicated database model.
Something like that is damn easy in Node.js for example, but I couldn't find a single way to achieve this in Rails. What shall I do?
EDIT
Thanks for the answers so far, but while they're inspiring, I think that I should stress out one key functionality that they're all missing. The variable should be editable inside the app and persistent. While it's possible to edit your variables, in case of server restart I'm back to the default - which is bad.
It really depends on what you are looking for. You could do something very simply by putting it in your application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
def system_message
"Come buy our amazing .99 iphone chocolate bar apps, with 100% more gamification!"
end
end
That function (and string) is then accessible from any controller in your application. You could also specify something in the after_initialize block in your application.rb file.
config.after_initialize do
::MYTEXT = "MY SUPER AMAZING TEXT"
end
You could also create your own file under the initializers directory, which is preloaded in rails.
so siteAnnounce.rb
MYANNOUNCEMENT = "NOW LISTEN TO ME!"
You may also want to check out this Railscast video about site wide announcements
I would store it in the database and let caching take care of it.
I feel that global variables are fine, when appropriate, for code that needs to share that common value in many places but that is the code, not the the user view.
This is clearly true in this case as the OP has bolded 'editable by the app'. So I would have a view that lets the users enter it, it gets stored in a db table and then recalled as needed (as cached once used once).
Well I had faced a similar problem.
My problem was I needed a global variable in all the levels (MVC).
We went to use Memcache to store the variable.
May be you can go for a similar solution.
And as an added bonus you can change it throughout the program.
You could declare it as a constant in an initializer:
config/initialzers/foo.rb:
MYVARIABLE = 'some string'
Accessible from anywhere in your application as MYVARIABLE
Ok, so here's what I did. Instead of just putting the value to an initializer, I've made there a simple class that handles it. The variable itself is stored in a predefined file. Besides of reading the file upon the initialization, the class updates file when the value is changed, and also re-read the file periodically to maintain consistency across workers. I've also put there some basic JSON handling and backup functionality to make life easier.
For anyone interested, here's the important code:
class Pomegranate
def initialize
#delay = 30.minutes
#path = "db/pomegranate.json"
#valid = Time.now - 1
validate
end
def get(*p)
validate
p.inject(#data) {|object,key| object[key] if object}
end
def set(*p, q, v)
hash = p.inject(#data) {|object,key| object[key]||={}}
hash[q] = v
end
def save
#valid = Time.now + #delay
File.open(#path,"w") {|f| f.write(#data.to_json)}
end
private
def validate
if #valid < Time.now
#data = ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(File.read(#path)) rescue {}
#valid = Time.now + #delay
#valid = Time.now - 1 if #data.empty?
end
end
end
$pom = Pomegranate.new
Source:
Where to put Global variables in Rails 3
Try putting it in your applicaton.rb like this:
module MyAppName
class Application < Rails::Application
YOUR_GLOBAL_VAR = "test"
end
end
Then you can call it with the namespace in your controllers, views or whatever..
MyAppName::Application::YOUR_GLOBAL_VAR
Another alternative would be using something like settingslogic. With settingslogic, you just create a yml config file and a model (Settings.rb) that points to the config file. Then you can access these settings anywhere in your rails app with:
Settings.my_setting
I've started putting constants and variables like this in the configuration object, e.g.
TestApp::Application.config.foo = 'bar'
TestApp::Application.config.something = { :a => 1, :b => 2 }
Stuff I've already figured out
I'm learning how to create a multi-tenant application in Rails that serves data from different schemas based on what domain or subdomain is used to view the application.
I already have a few concerns answered:
How can you get subdomain-fu to work with domains as well? Here's someone that asked the same question which leads you to this blog.
What database, and how will it be structured? Here's an excellent talk by Guy Naor, and good question about PostgreSQL and schemas.
I already know my schemas will all have the same structure. They will differ in the data they hold. So, how can you run migrations for all schemas? Here's an answer.
Those three points cover a lot of the general stuff I need to know. However, in the next steps I seem to have many ways of implementing things. I'm hoping that there's a better, easier way.
Finally, to my question
When a new user signs up, I can easily create the schema. However, what would be the best and easiest way to load the structure that the rest of the schemas already have? Here are some questions/scenarios that might give you a better idea.
Should I pass it on to a shell script that dumps the public schema into a temporary one, and imports it back to my main database (pretty much like what Guy Naor says in his video)? Here's a quick summary/script I got from the helpful #postgres on freenode. While this will probably work, I'm gonna have to do a lot of stuff outside of Rails, which makes me a bit uncomfortable.. which also brings me to the next question.
Is there a way to do this straight from Ruby on Rails? Like create a PostgreSQL schema, then just load the Rails database schema (schema.rb - I know, it's confusing) into that PostgreSQL schema.
Is there a gem/plugin that has these things already? Methods like "create_pg_schema_and_load_rails_schema(the_new_schema_name)". If there's none, I'll probably work at making one, but I'm doubtful about how well tested it'll be with all the moving parts (especially if I end up using a shell script to create and manage new PostgreSQL schemas).
Thanks, and I hope that wasn't too long!
Update Dec 5, 2011
Thanks to Brad Robertson and his team, there's the Apartment gem. It's very useful and does a lot of the heavy lifting.
However, if you'll be tinkering with schemas, I strongly suggest knowing how it actually works. Familiarize yourself with Jerod Santo's walkthrough , so you'll know what the Apartment gem is more or less doing.
Update Aug 20, 2011 11:23 GMT+8
Someone created a blog post and walks though this whole process pretty well.
Update May 11, 2010 11:26 GMT+8
Since last night I've been able to get a method to work that creates a new schema and loads schema.rb into it. Not sure if what I'm doing is correct (seems to work fine, so far) but it's a step closer at least. If there's a better way please let me know.
module SchemaUtils
def self.add_schema_to_path(schema)
conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{schema}, #{conn.schema_search_path}"
end
def self.reset_search_path
conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{conn.schema_search_path}"
end
def self.create_and_migrate_schema(schema_name)
conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
schemas = conn.select_values("select * from pg_namespace where nspname != 'information_schema' AND nspname NOT LIKE 'pg%'")
if schemas.include?(schema_name)
tables = conn.tables
Rails.logger.info "#{schema_name} exists already with these tables #{tables.inspect}"
else
Rails.logger.info "About to create #{schema_name}"
conn.execute "create schema #{schema_name}"
end
# Save the old search path so we can set it back at the end of this method
old_search_path = conn.schema_search_path
# Tried to set the search path like in the methods above (from Guy Naor)
# [METHOD 1]: conn.execute "SET search_path TO #{schema_name}"
# But the connection itself seems to remember the old search path.
# When Rails executes a schema it first asks if the table it will load in already exists and if :force => true.
# If both true, it will drop the table and then load it.
# The problem is that in the METHOD 1 way of setting things, ActiveRecord::Base.connection.schema_search_path still returns $user,public.
# That means that when Rails tries to load the schema, and asks if the tables exist, it searches for these tables in the public schema.
# See line 655 in Rails 2.3.5 activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb
# That's why I kept running into this error of the table existing when it didn't (in the newly created schema).
# If used this way [METHOD 2], it works. ActiveRecord::Base.connection.schema_search_path returns the string we pass it.
conn.schema_search_path = schema_name
# Directly from databases.rake.
# In Rails 2.3.5 databases.rake can be found in railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake
file = "#{Rails.root}/db/schema.rb"
if File.exists?(file)
Rails.logger.info "About to load the schema #{file}"
load(file)
else
abort %{#{file} doesn't exist yet. It's possible that you just ran a migration!}
end
Rails.logger.info "About to set search path back to #{old_search_path}."
conn.schema_search_path = old_search_path
end
end
Change line 38 to:
conn.schema_search_path = "#{schema_name}, #{old_search_path}"
I presume that postgres is trying to lookup existing table names when loading schema.rb and since you've set the search_path to only contain the new schema, it fails. This of course, is presuming you still have the public schema in your database.
Hope that helps.
Is there a gem/plugin that has these things already?
pg_power provides this functionality to create/drop PostgreSQL schemas in migration, like this:
def change
# Create schema
create_schema 'demography'
# Create new table in specific schema
create_table "countries", :schema => "demography" do |t|
# columns goes here
end
# Drop schema
drop_schema 'politics'
end
Also it takes care about correctly dumping schemas into schema.rb file.