Formatting time strings

http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_time.html#strftime

Localization

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/64948#74373

Here is a sample of application.rb:



require 'gettext/rails'

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  prepend_before_filter :default_locale

  def default_locale

    if (cookies["lang"].nil? or cookies["lang"].empty?)

      GetText.locale = "zh_CN"

    else

      GetText.locale = cookies["lang"]

    end

  end

  init_gettext "yourapp"

end

Reorganizing Schools & Courses

After seeing how schools organize their programs, it looks like I need to re-organize how I store the relevant data

1. Schools: In the school table I’ll keep track of:

• what languages taught (language_id)
• what kinds of courses taught (course_type_id)

These two columns will actually be join tables, since each school will not have a set number of languages or course types they teach, and also because the total number of languages and course types across all schools will change. By using join tables it’ll be easier to add new languages and course types.

A second benefit will be that the it’ll become easier to implement the pull-down search menus that are giving me so much trouble, since now all the data needed to create the pull-down menus will be in only one table instead of being spread between the schools & courses tables.

The drawback will be that the meta-information about what languages and types of courses each school offers will not be directly linked to the actual courses the school offers. For example, it might be possible for a school to say they offer courses in, say, Chinese and/or business conversation, but not actually offer any such courses. But the chances of that happening are slim. I’ll make sure that when school administrators log in, they’ll see an overview of their school’s info, and hopefully they’ll notice anything outdated.

2. Courses table will have:

• id
• school_id
• language_id
• title_en
• title_ja
• description_en
• description_ja

Show debug info

<h4>session</h4><%= debug(session) %>
<h4>params</h4><%= debug(params) %>
<h4>response</h4><%= debug(response) %>

Or, add to controller:

render_text @params.inspect 

A bit of MySQL true/false trivia

On Windows, MySQL returns true/false, and on Dreamhost 1/0. I'd sure like to know how to get Windows to return 1/0.

Hosting Rails apps on Dreamhost

Dreamhost wiki instructions are here.

Create a new subdomain, make the web directory subdomain.domain.com/public

Delete the logs.

Edit public/.htaccess, change dispatch.cgi to .fcgi in the RewriteRule

Default is production. so edit config/environment.rb, add ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'development' (or production, and create corresponding database)
In dispatch.fcgi and dispatch.rb, change ruby shebang location to #!/usr/bin/ruby

Upload the app's directories to the subdomain's root directory.

edit config/database.yml

chmod -R u+rwX,go-w public logchmod a+x dispatch.fcgi

If you're running in production mode, do 'killall -9 ruby' a few times after making any changes to the code.

More Questions

Question: What’s the media parameter in a stylesheet tag for?

Question: How do I use the same stylesheet but a different javascript file for each action?

HTML escape can be written <%=h product.title %> or <%= h(product.title)>

Notice the difference between the two:
<%= link_to ‘Add to Cart’, :action => ‘add_to_cart’, :id => product %>

<%= link_to ‘Add to Cart’, {:action => ‘add_to_cart’, :id => product }, :class => ‘addtocart’ %>

The curly brackets prevent the class declaration from being part of the URL.