Rails

Common Conventions

Favourite Gems

Devise
Simple Form
SeedBank

Functionality

SearchKick

SearchKick is used to leverage ElasticSearch.

Common conventions

Reindex the entire site from the command line

rails searchkick:reindex:all

Testing

Rspec

Cheatsheets:

1. Anchor.com
2. Ruby Pigeon

Cucumber

Factory Bot

FactoryBot is a fixtures replacement with a straightforward definition syntax, support for multiple build strategies (saved instances, unsaved instances, attribute hashes, and stubbed objects), and support for multiple factories for the same class (user, admin_user, and so on), including factory inheritance.

Capybara

Orderly

Orderly is a great utility to help test when you need to test the order of content on a page

Faker

Faker is a great way to create fake data for testing purposes

Creating unique results for faker data

Faker::Name.unique.first_name

Development

Figaro

Figaro is a simple environment management tool that works really well with Heroku.

Deployment steps

figaro heroku:set -e [environment name] --remote [remote name]

Rails Generators

Reference: cdesch cheatsheet on GitHub

Scaffolding

rails g scaffold [model name in singular] field_name:field_type

Common field types are

:string, :text, :integer, :float, :decimal, :datetime, :timestamp, :time, :date, :binary, :boolean, :references

Special examples

prices:decimal{8.2} can be used for prices

Migrations

Reference: Ruby Docs

Foreign References

rails generate migration AddAddressRefToContacts address:references

Dates

Reference: Ruby Docs

Creating a date

variable_name = Date.parse('December 23, 2019')

Returning values

variable_name.strftime('%B') returns 'December'

See RubyDocs for more examples

Relationships

References

Generating References

You can generate a reference through a rails generator

rails g migration AddPostToUsers post:references

By default, Rails 5 will make this relationship a required field by the model. However, you can override it at the model level

class User < ApplicationRecord
end

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user, required: true
end

Reference: thejspr

You may want to create a reference that has a different name from the model name. To do that, you will need to tweak the migration file

class AddCreatorToOrders < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2]
  def change
    add_reference :orders, :creator, foreign_key: { to_table: :users }
  end
end

You will then need to modify the models to reflect the relationship

belongs_to :creator, class_name: 'User'

Routing

Shallow Routes

Routing hierarchy quickly gets complicated. One of the strategies suggested by the Rails Guide is to use shallow routing where you split your routes into logical and reasonable structures

Dynamically calling variables and their methods

You can dynamically call methods in Ruby and this is super helpful for testing. Let’s say you have a User class with name and email as it’s methods. You can call it dynamically in your code as the following:

user = User.new
user.email = '[email protected]'
eval("user").send("email") = '[email protected]'

Common Display Conventions

Adding commas to large numbers

<%= number_with_precision(@number, precision: 2, delimiter: ',') %>

Changing cases for string

Downcase

Changes all letters to be lower case

Upcase

Changes all letters to be upper case

Titleize

Changes the first letter of every word to be upper case

Camelize

Changes the first letter of every sentence to be upper case

Tips and Tricks

Running a rails server that is accessible from another computer

rails s --bind 0.0.0.0

This binds your rails server to your network card rather than just the default localhost

Convert Strings to Symbols

Symbols are not variables and are closer to variables. The quick way to convert a string to a symbol is to do the following. Let's say you have a symbol

:some_symbol

To represent this as a symbol through a string, you could use this:

'some_symbol'.to_sym

Active Storage

Checking for file types

@model.content_type will return you the content type.

Checking for image dimensions
Assuming that your content_type is an image, using @model.metadata will return you the width and height of the image in a hash

Decomposing the route that the page came from

 @prev = Rails.application.routes.recognize_path(request.referrer)