There hasn’t been much of note in terms of big changes or features in edge Rails lately, so this time I’ll leave you to pore over the Rails commit logs for any bug fixes or minor changes that I haven’t pointed out. There has been some work in progress with ActionPack refactoring and multithreading work as well as some activity in ActiveModel too, but nothing really concrete yet (still very much a work in progress).

As usual, be sure to leave any suggestions and criticisms in the comments.

Thin support with script/server

script/server now checks for the availability of Thin and uses it. Pretty convenient if you are using Thin as your production server (and want to run the same when developing). You’ll have to add config.gem 'thin' to your environment.rb first to get this to work.

This patch was contributed by one of the guys at fluxin.

Changeset

String#humanize can be customized via inflection rules

The String#humanize core extension method is used convert strings with underscore, usually table column names, in them to pretty readable text. For example,

"actor_salary".humanize
=> "Actor salary"
"anime_id".humanize
=> "Anime"

Sometimes this doesn’t work out so well though, when you have legacy tables or simply “inhumanely” named column names like “act_sal_money” (which is really “Actor salary”, but would be #humanize-d to “Act Sal Money”).

You can now specify custom inflection rules (just like you would for plural/singular/irregular/uncountable inflection rules):

Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.human /_cnt$/, '\1_count'
  inflect.human 'act_sal_money', 'Actor Salary'
end

Notice how you can also use a regular expression above to convert columns like “click_cnt” to “Click count”.

Thumbs up to Dan Manges and Pascal Ehlert for this patch.

Changeset

Allow conditions on multiple tables to be specified using hash.

Pratik has committed a tiny (but really useful) change to ActiveRecord that allows you to specify conditions on a joined table in its own hash. An example would explain it better:

Anime.all(
  :joins => :character,
  :conditions => {
    :active => true,
    :characters => { :gender => 'female' }
  }
)

The ActiveRecord query above would find all “active” anime with “female” characters.

Changeset

Outro

That’s it for this week’s Living on the Edge – do let me know if you like to see more write-ups on even the minor bug fixes and changes that’d I’d left out this week.