Suggestions for Recipes

I’ve got the beta book and it looks quite good already. I have a few qualms about the title as I’m not convinced that those recipes really are “advanced” as compared to “more”. Anyway, I take it there are still a few pages to be filled and these are my suggestions:

• Multi-step forms and wizards
• Long-running and periodic tasks (backgrounDRb, bj)
• Custom validations
• Ajax Uploads (responds_to_parent plugin)
• Upload progress
• Admin-only “maintenance” UI
• Editing has_many and habtm associations
• Authorization at instance and attribute level
• callbacks and observers; built-in and self-defined

i agree with the above topics. Then it would be great to insert some in-dept recipes for real topics too….

If Mike agrees, I can write a recipe on BackgrounDRb. Its rather correct time to have this up, since BackgrounDRb 1.0 release will be out there in a day or two.

Hemant wrote a great recipe on the latest version of BackgrounDRb in the latest beta version which was just uploaded today.

Thanks, Hemant!

Has a decent pagination resource been covered somewhere extensively? If not, how about a recipe for improved pagination?

William: I use will_paginate:

http://errtheblog.com/posts/56-im-paginating-again

Thanks Mike. That is very helpful.

I would +1 on the multi-form model, e.g. a multi-page checkout screen.

Bill

William: Thanks. The multi-model form recipe is in the latest beta revision, along with a recipe for a wizard-like interface.

When I need a progress bar in a screen, I use a super simple Ajax Request-chaining technique that I call “Action Chunking”. It’s basically 4 lines of code + some code reorganisation; it doesn’t require any plugin or special server configuration.

See :

words : http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddmqwkxs_3972nphr5fk
demo : http://screencast.com/t/GiwRm3ziQy

I don’t remember seing this elsewhere, so it could maybe turn into a recipe.

I second (or third, fourth, ...) the admin UI recipe suggestion. I recently moved some controllers + views into an admin directory & had problems getting it to work until I added the admin ‘directive’ to the form in the view like so:
<% form_for([:admin,@dealer], :html => {:multipart => true }) do |f| %>.
I’m not sure if this is the way or a bad way.
Btw, after moving this stuff into my admin directory, I can’t get the image uploading recipe to work on these controllers!
It was not something that was easy to google.
Thanks

One more thought!
While it’s good to see recipes about rails logging, I’ve not seen anything about dealing with web logs. Imagine an extension to your recipe on user subdomains, that logged//reported on page views and referrers (to & from) so that users could see how popular their subdomain was? Perhaps you could deal with the best strategies to employ – logging hits in the database or chomping thro’ any existing web server stats.

Thanks again.

Ok, this may be too ambitious for a recipe or even completely off topic, but here goes anyway!

Imagine a situation where you need to create an application for selling a multiplicity of different products – cars, motorbikes, paintings, antiques, etc, etc. Each product has different attributes – cars have a model and manufacturer, paintings have an artist & title. Similar (manufacturer = artist, model = title) but not the same!

One approach might be to have a ‘products’ table with common fields such as id, price & then generic such as field3, field4, field5, etc, etc. Then one could subclass the ‘Product’ class with a Picture class that would define what field3, field4 for this class are called (field3=Artist, field4 = Title, etc).

How would/could such a ‘dynamic’ approach work with rails? Most of the examples I’ve seen re: rails are relatively straightforward mappings between a ‘products’ table and a ‘Product’ class.

Thanks

Last one, I promise!

A clear explanation and example of the use of dynamic vs static scaffolding.

Thanks

for me the upload chapter would be more helpful, and not yet another example of how to upload images in rails, (of which the other book from pragmatic “rails recipes” covers as do many other places on the web) if it were to talk more about general file uploading and post-processing.

even just doing this google search “upload image rails example”

points you at this and many other examples,

http://clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/2007/02/24

which seems to be the source of this recipe.

an example of other common forms of post processing might be, taking a tab or csv file with additional data about the “album” and saving that data to the database. another might be taking a ”.doc” file and converting it to a format that could be displayed from a rich text field in a database, like say people were asked to upload reviews of this “album”.

as was said above in the thread, the current state of the upload chapter is to me a case of more information, not more advanced examples.

Eddie: Rails 2 no longer has dynamic scaffolding, and Recipe #1 has an example of the new static scaffolding. Thanks for the other suggestions!

David: Thanks for your thoughts. I get a ton of email related to my attachment_fu blog, so I thought expanding it a bit in the book to answer common questions might be well received. I’d like to incorporate some additional information folks have suggested in this forum, as well. Rather than convert it into a generic file upload recipe, I’m thinking a separate recipe on, say, uploading a CSV file might be warranted.

Thanks everyone! Please keep the suggestions coming.

Mike, if you are going to do the csv, might i suggest the following to be clear about what i am suggesting.

there are many examples of how to store objects uploaded into the database, most of them are about images. what i think would be useful is to have an example of how to take apart the csv and put that data into the appropriate database fields related to say the album for example. say you had an album csv like this:

album_id,album_name,album_release_date,etc…

that it would loop through the csv, and do a find based on maybe album_id and if it did find it that it did an update, otherwise i would do an insert.

that would be truly useful to people that are using rails in a corporate environment where they might have tons of data being generated by other systems and wanted members of the corporation to say aggregate that information in a rails app.

thanks for listening,
dave

One recipe I would appreciate: automated photo uploads to S3 using attachment_fu and BackgrounDRb, with the background process updating the UI with progress re thumbnail generation/saving.