Is there an alternative to rail's auto_link helper method? - ruby-on-rails

I'm using the auto_link method in Rails to turn urls in plain text to clickable links. It works pretty good most of the time.
but
google.com doesn't create a link
Is there something else out there that provides better coverage of urls? Or is there anyway I can easily modify the Rails code to include .coms and .net without a http or www start string?

auto_link uses AUTO_LINK_RE which you can override.
you can place a file in config/initializers
module ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
silence_warnings do # you might need this to get rid of the warning
AUTO_LINK_RE = # your own definition here
end
end
It should work, but I never tried myself.

Related

Overriding Modules in Blacklight

I would like to override some of the methods defined in the file document_presenter.rb. How can I do this? This module is defined inside the Blacklight gem's "lib" directory.
Is there an easy way to do this? I'm fairly new to Ruby and Rails (coming from a pure Java background), so this is kind of difficult.
Thanks.
It sounds like you are talking about monkey patching the methods in the Backlight gem. You might want to read this post that explains more about monkey patching - and how not to break things badly!
In Ruby, you can always open an existing class, with the class keyword, and use the def keyword to redefine the original method.
class DocumentPresenter
def method_you_want_to_override
# Your code here.
end
end
So for example, you could put the above code into your lib folder:
lib/document_presenter.rb
See this answer re: auto-loading files in the lib folder.
After you've done that, whenever you call the method you've monkey patched on an instance of the DocumentPresenter class, the Ruby interpreter will run your code instead.
This is not recommended, as it can have dangerous and unpredictable results, as per then blog post I linked to.
A better practice, in Ruby 2, is to use Refinements.

Rails: Can't access a module in my lib directory

I'd like to create a general purpose string manipulation class that can be used across Models, Views, and Controllers in my Rails application.
Right now, I'm attempting to put a Module in my lib directory and I'm just trying to access the function in rails console to test it. I've tried a lot of the techniques from similar questions, but I can't get it to work.
In my lib/filenames.rb file:
module Filenames
def sanitize_filename(filename)
# Replace any non-letter or non-number character with a space
filename.gsub!(/[^A-Za-z0-9]+/, ' ')
#remove spaces from beginning and end
filename.strip!
#replaces spaces with hyphens
filename.gsub!(/\ +/, '-')
end
module_function :sanitize_filename
end
When I try to call sanitize_filename("some string"), I get a no method error. When I try to call Filenames.sanitize_filename("some string"), I get an uninitilized constant error. And when I try to include '/lib/filenames' I get a load error.
Is this the most conventional way to create a method that I can access anywhere? Should I create a class instead?
How can I get it working? :)
Thanks!
For a really great answer, look at Yehuda Katz' answer referenced in the comment to your question (and really, do look at that).
The short answer in this case is that you probably are not loading your file. See the link that RyanWilcox gave you. You can check this by putting a syntax error in your file - if the syntax error is not raised when starting your app (server or console), you know the file is not being loaded.
If you think you are loading it, please post the code you are using to load it. Again, see the link RyanWilcox gave you for details. It includes this code, which goes into one of your environment config files:
# Autoload lib/ folder including all subdirectories
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]
But really, read Yehuda's answer.

What is the simplest way to make a group of methods available to several Rails applications

tl;dr
What's a simple way I can create a view helpers module I can use in many apps?
What file, located where, loaded how?
I'm on Rails 2.3.11.
I have a bunch of view helper methods. Here's an example of one of them:
# Render form input fields to add or edit a ZIP code.
def render_zip_code_fields( model_instance )
# Bla bla bla ...
end
I have about 20 or so that I've developed over the years and often use in various applications. I'd like to wrap them all up in one file that I can just drop into and app and then be able to call them in my views.
Why not just copy-and-paste them into application_helper.rb? That just doesn't feel right to me. It seems like it should be a separate file.
In fact I tried creating in /lib...
# /lib/my_view_helpers.rb
module MyViewHelpers
# ...
end
And then in application_helper.rb I put...
include MyViewHelpers
But I got a lot of "uninitialized constant MyViewHelpers errors. Maybe a syntax error? I don't think I need to require my_view_helpers.rb first because it's in /lib. Everything in there gets loaded automatically, right?
So what's the right way to do this optimizing for simplicity?
Sorry this is so long. I get verbose when I'm tired.
As of Rails 3, /lib is no longer on the default load path. You will need to put the following line in the Application class in config/application.rb.
config.autoload_paths += ["#{config.root}/lib"]
An alternative would be to drop the file in app/helpers since it is a helper, after all.

Most appropriate way to generate directory of files from directory of template files with Rails and ERB?

My goal is to generate a directory of static html, javascript, and image files within my Rails (3) app, driven by ERB templates. For example, as a developer I might want to generate/update these files:
#{Rails.root}/public/products/baseball.html
#{Rails.root}/public/products/football.js
..from the following template files:
#{Rails.root}/product_templates/baseball.html.erb
#{Rails.root}/product_templates/football.js.erb
Ideally the templates would have access to my app's Rails environment (including URL helpers, view helpers, partials, etc.).
What's the latest and greatest way to accomplish this?
I experimented with a custom Rails generator, but found that I needed to write custom logic for skipping non-ERB files, substituting file names, etc. There must be a better way.
I'm not sure what you are trying to do exactly, that may help provide better answers, but here is some useful information:
You can call into erb directly, some information on that is here, which have probably already been doing:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/classes/ERB.html
For the list of template files an easy Dir.glob should be able to help find the specific files easily and loop through them:
http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Dir.html#M000629
The tricky part I wouldn't know how to advise you on is getting access to the helpers and other things Rails provides. The helpers that you write are just modules, so you could mix those in, something similar might be possible with the built-in rails helpers.
This is interesting and related but doesn't directly answer your question, since its uses the Liquid templating engine instead of ERB, but otherwise, it does some of the static site generation you are talking about:
https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll
This is how I accomplished something similar. It accepts source and destination directories, wipes out the destination, then processes the source directory, either ERB-processing files and placing them in the destination or simply copying them (in the case of on-ERB files). It would need to be modified to handle recursively processing a directory.
I invoke it from a rake task like so:
DirectoryGenerator.new.generate(Rails.root.join('src'), Rails.root.join('public', 'dest'))
class DirectoryGenerator
include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
default_url_options[:host] = 'www.example.com'
def generate(source, destination)
FileUtils.rmtree(destination)
FileUtils.mkdir_p(destination)
Dir.glob(File.join(source, '*')).each do |path|
pathname = Pathname.new(path)
if pathname.extname == '.erb'
File.open(destination.join(pathname.basename.sub(/\.erb$/, '')), 'w') do |file|
file.puts(ERB.new(File.read(path)).result(binding))
end
else
FileUtils.cp(pathname, File.join(destination, pathname.basename))
end
end
end
end
Have you looked into Rails templates?
http://m.onkey.org/rails-templates for instance..
Not sure what you are getting at exactly.. are you trying to generate client sites by providing a few parameters.. that the end goal?

generate nofollow links in RDiscount output

My rails app is using RDiscount to generate HTML from user-supplied markdown text, and I noticed that the anchor tags don't have rel="nofollow". This is a big issue for me as my app is open to the public. Is there a way to enable nofollow links, or are there better solutions?
Thanks!
I think this is possible only with Kramdown, which is a ruby Markdown parser with extended syntax. You would do that then as shown in the link:
[link](test.html){:rel='nofollow'}
In the mean time, I am using this hack, by re-parsing the RDiscount output and add a rel="nofollow" to each anchor:
def markdown(input)
html = RDiscount.new(input).to_html
doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse(html)
doc.css("a").each do |link|
link['rel'] = 'nofollow'
end
doc.to_html
end
Though I think this should really be handled by the markdown parser.
I needed to do something similar, add target="_new" to all links. Solved it using Kramdown and a custom Kramdown::Converter::Html class.
Define a Kramdown::Converter::Html subclass (kramdown/converter/my_html.rb in some autoload path)
class Kramdown::Converter::MyHtml < Kramdown::Converter::Html
def convert_a(el, indent)
el.attr['target'] = '_new'
super
end
end
I also have a view helper in app/helpers/application_helper.rb
def markdown(str)
Kramdown::Converter::MyHtml.convert(Kramdown::Document.new(str).root)[0].html_safe
end
Ideally it should be possible to just use Kramdown::Document.new(str).to_my_html.html_safe but I can't get it to work in rails development mode as Kramdown uses const_defined? to see if a converter is available and that does not trigger the autoloader. Please comment if you know how to fix this.
There is an open feature request on RDiscount to support modifying links in this fashion.
It is scheduled for one of the upcoming RDiscount 2.1.5.x releases.

Resources