Philipp's Profile

Philipp on #383 Uploading to Amazon S3 (pro) 2012-11-12 01:58:01

The carrierwave-direct gem implements the key methods through calling mount_uploader in the painting model.

Philipp on #102 Auto-Complete Association (revised) 2012-06-04 10:51:10

UPDATE: You have to wrap the following code around the columns loop to get it working with migrations:

          ruby
        
if self.table_exists?
  ...
end

Philipp on #102 Auto-Complete Association (revised) 2012-05-22 13:21:01

With the "server side solution" you can just pass your extra params through the path helper like this and the autocomplete jquery plugin will append them to the Ajax request:

_form.html.erb

          ruby
        
<%= f.text_field :category_name, data: {autocomplete_source: categories_path(your_extra_param: 'value')} %>

Philipp on #102 Auto-Complete Association (revised) 2012-05-22 12:56:12

Great screencast. It helped me to DRY this problem a little bit up for SIMPLE model constellations as mentioned in this screencast.

Enclosed you'll just find an untested refactoring version but an older similar refactoring version has been tested successfully ;-)

So I would generally transform all tags with a data-autocomplete-source attribute into an autocomplete input.

application.js.coffee

          ruby
        
jQuery ->
  $('[data-autocomplete-source*="auto"]').each (k, v) ->
    $(v).autocomplete
      source: $(v).attr('data-autocomplete-source')

This autocomplete data source can be put in a separate generic autocomplete action instead of the index action and be introduced to the client through a view helper:

application_helper.erb

          ruby
        
module ApplicationHelper
  def autocomplete_input(f, field)
    f.input "#{field}_name", data: {autocomplete_source: eval("autocomplete_#{field.to_s.tableize}_path")}
  end
end

_form.html.erb

          ruby
        
<%= autocomplete_input(f, :category) %>

routes.rb

          ruby
        
resources :categories do
  collection do 
    get :autocomplete
  end
end

This module about a generic autocomplete action can be included at the top of every resource controller based on a ActiveRecord::Base child class (you have to set the autocomplete route for each controller as shown above):

          ruby
        
module AutocompleteAction
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern
  
  def autocomplete
    render json: (
      request.path.split('/')[1, 2].first.classify.constantize.
      select(:name).order(:name).where("name LIKE ?", "%#{params[:term]}%").
      map(&:name)
    )
  end
end

The association setters could be generated dynamically through meta programming.

So the following code generates special setter methods for all belongs_to and polymorphic associations when included in an ActiveRecord::Base child class.

          ruby
        
module AssociationSetter
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  included do              
    columns.map(&:name).select{|c| c.match('_id')}.each do |column|
      association = column.split('_id').first.classify
      
      define_method "#{association.underscore}_name" do
        self.send(association.underscore).try(:name)
      end
      
      accessible_attributes << "#{association.underscore}_name"
      
      define_method "#{association.underscore}_name=" do |name|
        return if name.blank?
        
        association_type = association
        
        if self.class.columns.map(&:name).include?("#{association.underscore}_type")
          association_type = self.send("#{association.underscore}_type")
        end
        
        self.send("#{association.underscore}=", association_type.constantize.find_or_initialize_by_name(name))
      end
    end
  end
end

P.S.: Maybe it turns out to be worth to extract in a gem some day ;-)

Comments by Philipp