Hey everyone, Happy Saturday!

Vipul here with the latest updates for This Week in Rails. Let’s dive in!

This week, the Rails Foundation released a series of updated resources to help you learn the new Rails 8 defaults, including a brand new Getting Started Tutorial, a 9-part video series on YouTube, and updated Rails Guides.

Read the announcement here. The Installation Guide has also been decoupled so it is easier to find, and includes the basics of installing Ruby with a version manager - arguably one of the biggest barriers to newcomers.

Rails Versions 7.0.8.7, 7.1.5.1, 7.2.2.1, and 8.0.0.1 have been released!
These are security patches addressing one new issue where using the content_security_policy helper with untrusted user input could lead to a bypass of the browser Content Security Policy.

Rails Version 8.0.1 has been released!
A new minor release - 8.0.1, is also out! Head over the CHANGELOG, to check the full set of changes in this release.

Doximity Case Study - Fast, Flexible, and Scalable
We also have a new official case study in! Check out how Rails powers Doximity’s Healthcare Platform. Here are some Highlights from the study:

• Rails accelerates development: Doximity’s team rapidly iterates on new products and features, helping doctors save time and focus on patient care.
• Rails ensures long-term stability: By maintaining and evolving their 15-year-old monolith, Doximity avoids rewrites.
• Rails scales with success: As Doximity grows, Rails helps optimize the performance of 45+ applications and handle increasing traffic with ease.

Accept a block for ActiveJob::ConfiguredJob#perform_later
This pull request adds support for accepting a block for ActiveJob::ConfiguredJob#perform_later. This was previously inconsistent with a regular ActiveJob::Base#perform_later.

Fix if_exists/if_not_exists for foreign keys addition and removal
This PR addresses a few improvements with foreign keys additions/removals and if_exists/if_not_exists:

• If there is a foreign key on a custom column and add_foreign_key on a default column with if_not_exists is used, an error was raised.
• When adding a foreign key with if_not_exists, :primary_key was not considered.
• When removing a foreign key with if_exists, custom column was not being considered.

Changing column nullability does not change default function
This Pull Requests fixes MySQL default functions getting dropped when changing a column’s nullability.

Migrate ActiveRecord::Normalization to Active Model
ActiveRecord::Normalization has now been moved to Active Model. This change backports ActiveRecord::Normalization to ActiveModel::Attributes::Normalization. With this change we can now use this feature in PORO with ActiveModel::Attributes::Normalization -

class User
  include ActiveModel::Attributes
  include ActiveModel::Attributes::Normalization

  attribute :email, :string

  normalizes :email, with: -> email { email.strip.downcase }
end

user = User.new
user.email = " CRUISE-CONTROL@EXAMPLE.COM\n"
user.email # => "cruise-control@example.com"

Change ActionText::RichText#embeds assignment to before_validation
Prior to this change, assignment to the embeds association happened after validation callbacks, so it wasn’t possible to incorporate Rich Text-related file validation.

SQLite3: Use default function as default insert value
Previously, if a column defined a function as its default value, the function would never be called during fixture insertion. It now works as expected with this addition.

You can view the whole list of changes here. We had 41 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

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