Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
The first transistor was developed at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1948
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Live Search With Ruby On Rails Part 3
In my previous posts on Rails Live Search (1, 2) I outlined some reservations I had regarding a typical live search implementation. One outstanding issue was that the framework provides a
text_fieldhtml helper that seems unusable due to the fact that all form elements must be backed by the model. As tomtoday pointed out to me, this is simply not true. The Rails framework does provide a facility to render form elements that are not backed by the model using the_taghelper elements (text_field_tag, select_tag,etc.)Many thanks to tomtoday for pointing this out to me. There's even a big fat section in the Agile Web Development With Rails book titled Working With Nonmodel Fields on page 366. Exactly how did I miss that!?
Monday, May 01, 2006 09:36 PM EDT1 Comments Filed in: Software -
What An Idiot
Monday, May 08, 2006 08:08 PM EDT
I understand that some people are brighter than others, but this guy should definitely win some kind of award for being a moron. I can't believe I actually got on the subway today with the sole purpose of witnessing this nonsense. What an idiot.
0 Comments Filed in: Randomness -
Live Search With Ruby On Rails Part 4 - request.xhr?
After receiving some excellent advice from someone named Ivan, I've decided to revisit the topic of live search in Ruby on Rails yet another time. In this post written way back in February, I outlined the steps necessary to gracefully degrade the Ajax-style live search for browsers that have Javascript disabled. This required two distinct methods in the search controller: one for Javascript enabled browsers that would render the search results directly within the target element, and one for non-Javascript enabled browsers which would return the users back to the page they invoked the search from. To re-iterate, here's the search controller listing:
def search #Javascript-enabled search
get_search_results #implementation not shown
render :partial => "search"
end
def search_no_Javascript #Javascript-disabled search
get_search_results #implementation not shown
redirect_to :back
end
Admittedly, this design leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest concern here is that the code does not directly address the scenario of the user's browser having Javascript enabled, but not being able to support the XmlHttpRequest object (I say not directly since the code will still work if the user submits the form with the enter button, since no search button will be present.) The other (more theoretical) issue is that we have written two methods to do exactly the same thing, where the second method exists solely for graceful degradation of the view.
Well, it turns out that we can actually fix the latter. The framework provides us with
request.xhr?, or the arguably nicer alias ofrequest.xml_http_request?, which decides if the request has come from an Ajax-style call. The Rails API states that this decision is based on the 'X-Requested-With' header containing 'XMLHttpRequest', which is apparently done automatically by the framework whenever an Ajax request is made. This seems useful at first glance, but just remember that since this relies only on header information, it is possible that this could be simulated by any request.OK, since I'm starting to look a bit too far into this now, let's see how this new discovery allows us to completely remove the un-needed second search method from our controller:
def search
get_search_results
if request.xhr?
render :partial => "search"
else
redirect_to :back
end
Also, the implementation of
get_search_resultscan be placed directly in the search method if you prefer, as the extraction of this code is no longer necessary.This still leaves us with the problem of Javascript support without XmlHttpRequest support. Some would argue that this scenario will effect a negligible number of users, but I'd still like to figure out a way to get around this.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006 11:37 PM EDT0 Comments Filed in: Software