Easy way to find a view file in rails? - ruby-on-rails

I develop rails applications with my designer who has minimum knowledge about rails.
She works on Windows through file-sharing from a Linux server.
She always has hard time finding view files to work on.
I usually use 'grep' to find a view file.
But she can't.
If you have a good suggestion, please share with me.
I have an idea which may be overkill.
Is there a way to automatically add comments around view files (including layouts and partials?) in html file?
Like this:
<!--Starting app/views/some_dir/some_file.html.erb-->
HTML here...
<!--Ending app/views/some_dir/some_file.html.erb-->
This way, my designer can find the file very easily.
Of course, this should be automatic and development environment only.
Thanks.
Sam

I use the Rails Footnotes gem (https://github.com/josevalim/rails-footnotes) in some of my projects which allows me to click a link in the footer of my app that opens the current view (also shows partials) in TextMate. Not sure if it could be customised to work with a Windows text editor but you could look at the URL to work out the file name.
I.e to open a file in MacVim, it creates the following link:
mvim://open?url=file:///Users/steveholt/Sites/foo/app/views/projects/log.html.haml
and for TextMate:
txmt://open?url=file:///Users/steveholt/Sites/foo/app/views/projects/log.html.haml

Related

Embed PDF in a website, allow user to modify editable fields in PDF, and save back to the server

I am writing a Program in Rub On Rails 4.x and I have to take PDF files with defined fields that can be filled out, fill in data from a form submission(This part is DONE!), and lastly allow the user to modify the saved PDF file on the server and overwrite said PDF after making their modifications.
Like I said I have already gotten the PDF files filled out with what has been submitted in the form through pdftk . What I now need to do is provide a server side editing capability to the said PDF files on server generated from the first step of the process.
I have seen similar posts but none wanting to do the same thing I do. If I am wrong links would be great. Thanks in advance for all your help!
After lots of digging and research here is what I have found to be the facts surrounding this issue and implementing a program to allow embedding the PDF file, editing it, and saving it back to the server. This process would be great however from what I can tell there is nothing out there that really does this for Ruby On Rails. To quote #Nick Veys
Seems like you need to find a Javascript PDF editor you can load your PDF into, allow the user to modify it, and ultimately submit it back to the server. Seems like they exist, here's one for ASP projects
You are correct but still wrong in the sense that yes there is one for ASP projects however that is Microsoft Based, yes I know that it can run on Linux environments through Mono. However to the point it would appear in this instance that a Ruby On Rails specific solution is indeed needed.
The solution that we have come up with is as follows
1. Use a PDF editing package in the linux repositories like PDFtk
2. You then render a page with the PDF embeded on one side and a form representing the live fields in the PDF to take input.
3. Once submitted you use PDFtk to write the values into a new template PDF file and overwrite what was previously stored.
This requires a few additional steps to process the data than I really care for myself. However it is the best solution that our team could come up with, without bleeding the project budget dry for just 1 piece of functionality.
I hope this helps anyone else looking to do the same thing in Ruby On Rails.
I have done something like this using my company's .NET product. It can also be done using its Java version too.
http://www.gnostice.com/nl_article.asp?id=255&t=Save_Form_Submit_Data_Back_To_Original_PDF_Document_In_NET

Using Your Own Text Editor On a Server

Are there any hosting providers which allow you to use your own text editor to edit hosted files? At the moment, I'm using Namecheap and I can only edit hosted files through their code editor which means I need to edit the files locally and then upload them if I want to use my own text editor. I'd really like to develop a site directly on the server so skipping this step would save quite a bit of time.
Specifically, I'd like to use Sublime Text 2. Google didn't help so I'm hoping someone hear could point me in the right direction.
Thanks.
It looks like EasyEditors might have what you need. It appears that you can edit the files on their site.

How do I simply send my rails website to my designer so he can finish the design?

Basically I need to send to my designer a non-finished rails website.
My Designer doesn't have ruby / Rails environnement installed and should be able to:
modify the CSS
add some html elements
I can manually check the diff after he worked.
Is there a way that I can make an easy extraction of my app or giving an access to the deployed one with capacity to re-root the css from his files?
Based on your question, your designer, in addition to the design, also writes code: he creates css files, and edit your views files. That makes him an integrator.
As such, he should learn the basics of source control management, such as git, svn or any system you prefer (my favorite is Bazaar, for its simplicity).
It is a best practice that will allow you to save some time and avoid a lot of headaches when merging your revisions. A nice side effect: he will be able to easily roll-back to a previous working version of the code, should anything bad have happened.

LaTeX: Are there any web frontends available?

As of now the workflow is something like, I import an SVN or a CVS repository and then compile a document locally on my machine to get either a ps or a pdf file. But I was wondering if there is a Web front-end to do all the stuff, like for instance, an editor using which you can edit the file online and then download just the pdf file by compiling it?
Any suggestions?
http://www.scribtex.com/pages/index
http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/
latex-lab will build on top of the google apps editor base...
scribtex is hosted only it looks like.
Another to add to the list is TeXonWeb.
If you mean online LaTeX compilers, then there are two I know of - at baywifi.com (to PDF) and at ScienceSoft (to several formats). Haven't seen any full editors, though.
There is a CMS based on Latex out there at www.osreviews.net.
The best site I found to produce PDF from LaTeX online is PC Shows.
Verbosus offers an Online LaTeX Editor that supports PDF preview, HTTPS, syntax highlighting, code completion, templates, etc. (Additionally it offers an editor for Octave/Matlab)
This is less of a web-based interface than a simple drag-and-drop cgi script that converts latex syntax to a graphic... www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html
latex-online is a simple open source web service that compiles latex sources/public git repos and returns pdf's. It has both a simplistic web front-end and a command-line tool for interacting with the service - you might find it interesting.
One rather new possibility is https://texlive.net/
You can either interactively edit your documents or you can pass your document via the url to it. E.g. a simple hello world document can be constructed as
https://texlive.net/run?%5Cdocumentclass%7Barticle%7D%0A%5Cusepackage%7Bamsmath%7D%0A%5Cbegin%7Bdocument%7D%0AHello%20world!%0A%5Cend%7Bdocument%7D

How does theming for ziya charts work?

I'm implementing charts using The Ziya Charts Gem. Unfortunately, the documentation isn't really helpful or I haven't had enough coffee to figure out theming. I know I can set a theme using
chart.add(:theme, 'whatever')
Problem: I haven't found any predefined themes, nor have I found a reference to the required format.
If you install the ZiYa plug-in into your Rails application there should be a themes directory where you said. Just copy one of the existing themes, change its name to whatever you want, and then modify it however you like.
Another options for nice Flash charts is Open Flash Chart. I moved from Ziya/SWF Charts to Open Flash Chart when working on Flash charts in a Rails app I was working on. There is also a Rails plug-in for Open Flash Chart. Besides the fact that it is easier to work with, Open Flash Chart is open source, so if you can hack Flash you can customize it.
As I understand it, the themes are used by initializing the theme directory in your ziya.rb file like so:
Ziya.initialize(:themes_dir => File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), %w[.. .. public charts themes]) )
And you'll need to set up the proper directory, in this case public/charts/themes. It doesn't come with any in there to start with as I recall. Are you having problems past this?
To partly answer my own question, there are some themes in the website sources which can be checked out at
svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/liquidrail/samples/charting
(then go to /public/charts/themes/)

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