active-record episodes

You know those invitation systems where a given user can invite a number of other people to join? That's what I show you how to make in this episode.

If you need a full text search engine, Thinking Sphinx is a great solution. See why in this episode.

Rails 2.1 brings some new caching features which makes it very easy to cache any values including models. See how in this episode.

If you want Rails to behave a certain way, try changing it and submitting a patch. This episode will show how to do exactly this using Git.

The scoped method allows you to generate named scopes on the fly. In this episode I show how to use anonymous scopes to improve the conditional logic which was used in the previous episode on advanced search form.

If you need to create an advanced search with a lot of fields, it may not be ideal to use a GET request as I showed in episode 37. In this episode I will show you how to handle this by creating a Search resource.

Rails 2.1 keeps track of the changes you make to a model's attributes. It also allows you to see what the previous value was. But watch out for the gotcha! See this episode for details.

The named_scope method in Rails 2.1 makes performing finds on models very elegant and convenient. See how in this episode.

Sometimes you need to display an administrative announcement to every page on the site and give the users the ability to hide the announcement. See how in this episode.

In this episode I walk you through an exercise in refactoring by taking a long method and making it more concise.