Fuzz Productions

Searchlogic, Postgres, and Case Insensitive Ordering

Unfortunately when using postgres the default ordering is case sensitive such that all Capitalized values come before all lowercase values. This seems counter intuitive and certainly not desired in my project. As far as I can tell there is currently no support for case insensitive ordering with searchlogic. I was able to solve this by adding two new named_scopes in Searchlogic::NamedScopes::Ordering.create_ordering_conditions like so:

      named_scope("iascend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "upper(#{table_name}.#{column}) ASC"})
      named_scope("idescend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "upper(#{table_name}.#{column}) DESC"})

Search logic rocks, and I know it’s bad practice to be hacking plugins so I’m hoping this will be included in the next release.  There were a couple other subtle changes that I had to make to get it to work.  To use this patch, copy the below code into /config/initializers/searchlogic_extensions.rb:

module Searchlogic

  module NamedScopes

    module Ordering

        

        def ordering_condition_details(name)

          # raise name.to_s

          if name.to_s =~ /^(ascend|descend|iascend|idescend)_by_(#{column_names.join("|")})$/

            {:order_as => $1, :column => $2}

          elsif name.to_s =~ /^order$/

            {}

          end

        end

        

        def create_ordering_conditions(column)

          named_scope("ascend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "#{table_name}.#{column} ASC"})

          named_scope("descend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "#{table_name}.#{column} DESC"})

        

          named_scope("iascend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "upper(#{table_name}.#{column}) ASC"})

          named_scope("idescend_by_#{column}".to_sym, {:order => "upper(#{table_name}.#{column}) DESC"})

        end

    end

    

    module AssociationOrdering

      private        

        def association_ordering_condition_details(name)

          associations = reflect_on_all_associations.collect { |assoc| assoc.name }

          if name.to_s =~ /^(ascend|descend|iascend|idescend)_by_(#{associations.join("|")})_(\w+)$/

            {:order_as => $1, :association => $2, :condition => $3}

          end

        end

    end

  end

end

You can now use MyObject.iascend_by_name and MyObject.idescend_by_name.

Those damn field with errors divs

It seems to be a common issue where css developers are battling with the <div> tags that rails drops in when there are errors in a form. In searching for a solution to this I came across this one:

ActionView::Base.field_error_proc = Proc.new { |html_tag, instance|
"<span class=\"fieldWithErrors\">#{html_tag}</span>" }

placed at the end of your config/environment.rb file. This appeared to work fine until I tried firing up my console getting the following error:

	Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3)
	/config/environment.rb:45:NameError: uninitialized constant ActionView
	/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.3/lib/rails/backtrace_cleaner.rb:2:NameError: uninitialized constant ActiveSupport::BacktraceCleaner
	/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.3/lib/console_with_helpers.rb:5:NameError: uninitialized constant ApplicationController

… so console doesn’t know anything about ActionView and thusly fails to load your environment when it crosses that line. So instead I decided to move the code to config/initializers/field_with_errors.rb like so:

module ActionView
 class Base
 def self.field_error_proc
 Proc.new { |html_tag, instance|  "<span class=\"fieldWithErrors\">#{html_tag}</span>" }
 end
 end
end

Worked like a charm.

Rails, Postgres, and Snow Leopard

Upon installing Snow Leopard I found that my postgres installation was no longer working.  Turns out a newer version of postgres (postgres84… I was using 83) was released and is compatible with Snow Leopard.  My postgres installation for Snow Leopard using macports looks like this:

sudo port install postgresql84-server

sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/db/postgresql84/defaultdb

sudo chown postgres:postgres /opt/local/var/db/postgresql84/defaultdb

sudo su postgres -c ‘/opt/local/lib/postgresql84/bin/initdb -D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql84/defaultdb’

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.postgresql84-server.plist

sudo launchctl start org.macports.postgresql84-server

psql84 -U postgres

And the postgres gem:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch x86_64” gem install postgres — —with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql84 —with-pgsql-include=/opt/local/include/postgresql84

Vlad with Git

So I just got a new computer and I was installing all my gems and downloading all my repos onto it to get my new system up to speed.  I did the standard

sudo gem install vlad

and then tried to deploy with

rake vlad:deploy

only to find that for some reason vlad was refusing to read my config/deploy.rb file.  Instead I got the error “Don’t know how to build task: ‘vlad:deploy’”.

As it turns out when using vlad with git you have to also include the vlad-git library.  So I ran

sudo gem install vlad-git

and everything ran as normal.  Too bad that little fact didn’t make it into the vlad documentation, but here it is anyway.  Happy deploying.