After a couple of months of intense coding Robert Loch and I launched RecommendBox yesterday. Its a site based around requesting and giving recommendations to your friends. There were a few immediate issues!! IE 6 is not yet fully supported, but on the whole it went ok. Now, sleep…….

I should point out that the spam was due to the site (i.e me and a false belief they wouldn’t find it) and nothing to do with the FCKeditor or the plugin.

ActionView::TemplateError: Expected image.rb to define Image

or this:

SystemExit (exit):
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:70:in `exit'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:70:in `rootdir'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:84:in `directory'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:258:in `so_name'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:294:in `load_cache'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:678:in `inline'
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/image_science-1.1.3/lib/image_science.rb:84

in your log files when using ImageScience you may well of been a bit confused and frustrated – I was.

Then through a fair bit of googling I came across Stephen Sykes blog and his post which gave me the answer. It turns out that Ruby Inline a directory called “.ruby_inline” to store its extensions. It chooses this directory from either the environment setting INLINEDIR, or if that isn’t set then HOME – unfortunately for myself, Stephen and presumably yourself if this is of interest your server is probably running as a user without a HOME dir!!! To get around this simply add this to your environment.rb file (and make sure the server user has access!):

if RAILS_ENV == "production"
  ENV['INLINEDIR'] = RAILS_ROOT + "/tmp"
end

Not the clearest errors ever thrown!!!!

How I converted Type to Mephisto

Finally switched to Mephisto

The solution given for fixing your routes found in the later of these I found also needed this line:

Mephisto::Routing.redirect '/articles' => '/'

to get all my permalinks to work. The result on my memory usage is pretty dramatic and hopefully I won’t get as much spam…..

Tutorial On Developing A Facebook Platform Application With Ruby on Rails

Continuing Facebook Applications With Ruby on Rails

Fist in your Facebook

I especially liked the Mime type for fbml that is from the last post, simply add:

Mime::Type.register 'text/html', :fbml
ActionController::MimeResponds::Responder::DEFAULT_BLOCKS[:fbml] = %(lambda { render :action => "\#{action_name}_fbml" })

to environment.rb and off you go.

The first two were very helpful in getting things going but seemed to make some really simple things very complicated. One was invites. Facebook supply a very nice fbml helper for creating invite pages the fb:multi-friend-selector.

This can be used like so:

<fb:request-form action="http://apps.facebook.com/myapp" method="POST" type="MyApp" content="<%= render :partial => 'invite_fbml' %>">
    <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Select the friends you want to install MyApp" exclude_ids="<%= @friends_with_app %>"/>
</fb:request-form>

Where the invite partial looks like:

<fb:name uid='<%= @current_fb_user.facebook_uid %>' firstnameonly='true' shownetwork='false'/> wants you to install MyApp
<fb:req-choice url='http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=APIKEY' label='Install MyApp'/>

and the controller method goes a bit like:

def index
  fql =  "SELECT uid, name FROM user WHERE uid IN" <<
  "(SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = #{@current_fb_user.facebook_uid}) AND has_added_app = 1"
  friends = fbsession.fql_query :query => fql
  ids = []
  (friends/:user).each do|u|
    ids << (u/:uid).inner_html
  end
  @friends_with_app = ids.join(',')

  respond_to do |format|
    format.html # index.rhtml
    format.fbml # index_fbml.rhtml - facebook
  end
end

Put it all together and you get something like:

Ta da!! You can also provide a post invite hook which will be the action provided to the facebook form element.

Now go and install Nothing to see it in action.

class ModelA < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :model_b, :with_deleted => true
end

This works quite nicely for that ModelA, but what happens if you want to include the deleted ModelA’s from ModelB through a has_one relationship…… its falls over. However that is easily fixed.

Simply create a new file in the lib/caboose/acts directory called has_one_with_deleted_association.rb and paste in the following:

module Caboose # :nodoc:
  module Acts # :nodoc:
    class HasOneWithDeletedAssociation < ActiveRecord::Associations::HasOneAssociation
      private
      def find_target
        @reflection.klass.find_with_deleted(:first,
          :conditions => @finder_sql,
           rder      => @reflection.options[:order],
          :include    => @reflection.options[:include]
        )
      end
    end
  end
end

Then open up the init.rb file and change the contents to match:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/lib/caboose/acts/belongs_to_with_deleted_association'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/lib/caboose/acts/has_one_with_deleted_association'

class << ActiveRecord::Base
  def belongs_to_with_deleted(association_id, options = {})
    with_deleted = options.delete :with_deleted
    returning belongs_to_without_deleted(association_id, options) do
      if with_deleted
        reflection = reflect_on_association(association_id)
        association_accessor_methods(reflection,            Caboose::Acts::BelongsToWithDeletedAssociation)
        association_constructor_method(:build,  reflection, Caboose::Acts::BelongsToWithDeletedAssociation)
        association_constructor_method(:create, reflection, Caboose::Acts::BelongsToWithDeletedAssociation)
      end
    end
  end
  alias_method_chain :belongs_to, :deleted

  def has_one_with_deleted(association_id, options = {})
    with_deleted = options.delete :with_deleted
    returning has_one_without_deleted(association_id, options) do
      if with_deleted
        reflection = reflect_on_association(association_id)
        association_accessor_methods(reflection,            Caboose::Acts::HasOneWithDeletedAssociation)
        association_constructor_method(:build,  reflection, Caboose::Acts::HasOneWithDeletedAssociation)
        association_constructor_method(:create, reflection, Caboose::Acts::HasOneWithDeletedAssociation)
      end
    end
  end
  alias_method_chain :has_one, :deleted
end
ActiveRecord::Base.send :include, Caboose::Acts::Paranoid

Voila, you can now say:

class ModelB < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :model_a, :with_deleted => true
end

There is every chance this is a little hacky, but it seems to be working for me at the mo.

Richard White gives a bit more info about it on his blog.

This will pretty much draw to a close this blog being used for the docs as AjaxScaffold will get an EOL stamp once ActiveScaffold reaches v1.0. So thank you to all who have given us feedback and supported the project so far.

This is simply a fix for the v3 plugin and contains none of the new (and very exciting stuff) coming in v4. It should be a straight upgrade for anyone on 3.2.2.