Hi there! This is Andy with another edition of This Week in Rails. This week we’re covering two weeks worth of changes, so let’s dive right in.

New

Hooks for action_controller_base and action_controller_api

This change breaks out two Action Controller hooks, where there was one before. action_controller_base and action_controller_api. These can be used to load less code at boot time.

Fixture accessor with no arguments

Do you need to load all the fixtures of a particular type? Calling a fixture accessor method with no arguments returns all fixtures.

Implement fetch_values for HashWithIndifferentAccess

Add fetch_values for HashWithIndifferentAccess in Rails, added to Ruby in 2.3.0. Support was added conditionally by using method_defined?.

Fixed

Clear active connections after initialization

If your app uses a lot of database connections, this one is worth a look. The author said that after deploying this change, they reduced their peak open database connection count by 13%.

Fix mistake in JS response parser

This change restores the ability to accept ecmascript for parsing. The author also declares that the JS response should not modify the DOM. Take a look!

Improved

Doc improvement for before_destroy

Did you know that before_destroy hooks should be set *before* dependent: destroy for it to work correctly? This documents that.

Don’t freeze input strings

Check this out if you’re curious about changes around frozen strings and usages of Immutable String (Matz said “All String literals are immutable (frozen) on Ruby 3”).

Whew! That covers just some of the changes in the first couple of weeks of April. Many other great pull requests are available to browse, from 27 contributors including 5 first-timers. Nice work!

Until next week!