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  • Indexing ActiveRecord Objects in an Ordered Collection

    Posted 22 June 2009

    Ever wanted to find the index of an ActiveRecord object in a collection? By collection, I’m referring to both associations and named scopes, the two types of lazy-loaded object collections available in ActiveRecord.

    Suprisingly, Rails offers no easy way of doing this without loading the entire collection. This is fine for small collections, but once your data grows the operation will become more expensive.

    The Problem

    Let’s take an example. Say we have an Author model which has_many :articles. We have a given @author, and our collection is @author.articles.

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  • Model-Based Subdomain Routes for Rails

    Posted 03 June 2009

    In my first article, I described a new rubygem for adding subdomain routing to Rails applications. In this second part, I’ll describe the use of the gem to key subdomain-based routes to your models.

    Defining Model-Based Subdomain Routes

    The idea here is to have the subdomain of the URL keyed to an ActiveRecord model. Let’s take a hypothetical example of a site which lists items under different categories, each category being represented under its own subdomain. Assume our Category model has a subdomain attribute which contains the category’s custom subdomain. In our routes we’ll still use the subdomain mapper, but instead of specifying one or more subdomains, we just specify a :model option:

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  • Adding Subdomains to Rails Routing

    Posted 02 June 2009

    The Rails routing system is a pretty impressive, labyrinthine piece of code. There’s a fair bit of magic going on to make your routes so easy to define and use in the rest of your Rails application. One area in which the routing system is limited however is its use of subdomains: it’s pretty much assumed that your site will be using a single, fixed domain.

    There are times where it is preferable to spread a website over multiple subdomains. One common idiom in URL schemes is to separate aspects of the site under different subdomains, representative of those aspect. It many cases a simple, fixed subdomain scheme is desirable: support.whatever.com, forums.whatever.com, gallery.whatever.com and so on. On some international sites, the subdomain is used to select the language and localization: en.wikipedia.org, fr.wikipedia.org, ja.wikipedia.org. Other schemes allocate each user of the site their own subdomain, so as to personalise the experience (blogspot.com is a good example of this).

    A couple of plugins currently exists for Rails developers wishing to incorporate subdomains into their routes. The de facto standard is SubdomainFu. (I’ll admit – I haven’t actually used this plugin myself.) There’s also SubdomainAccount.

    I’ve recently completed work on a subdomain library which fully incorporates subdomains into the rails routing environment – in URL generation, route recognition and in route definition, something I don’t believe is currently available. As an added bonus, if offers the ability to define subdomain routes which are keyed to a model (user, category, etc.) stored in your database.

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  • Password Resets Using ActiveUrl

    Posted 22 May 2009

    In my previous article I described my ActiveUrl gem for Ruby on Rails applications, using a new-user registration page as an example. Let’s take a look at another application of the library – implementing a “reset password” function. Basically, we want to allow an user to change his/her password without logging in. We’ll achieve this by sending the secret URL to the user when they submit a “forgot your password?” form.

    Again, the basic idea is to hide the password-editing page behind the secret URL. The password-editing page will not be protected by the usual authentication requirements; instead, the knowledge of the secret URL is what authenticates the user.

    Model

    Let’s first take a look at an ActiveUrl model for the secret URL. We want to create an instance from an email address, which is what the user will still know once the password is forgotten. We could declare an email attribute as in the previous article, but the only thing our model really needs is a reference to a user, which we can derive from the email.

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  • Secret URLs in Rails

    Posted 19 May 2009

    Like many Rails websites, my first production Rails site needed user sign-ups. I wanted to have this work in a way that allowed a user to register only after confirming their email address.

    The way to do this is with secret URLs.These are URLs that contain an encrypted string and are effectively impossible to guess. By sending a secret URL to an email address, if the URL is subsequently accessed, that’s pretty much a guarantee that the email was received, since there’s no other way that URL could have been obtained. (Check out the Rails Recipes book, which has a good chapter explaining secret URLs.)

    Introducing the ActiveUrl Gem

    As a first attempt at contributing to the Rails community, I’ve extracted my site’s secret URL functionality into a gem. Since it’s used in a similar fashion to ActiveRecord, I’ve called it ActiveUrl.

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