Adding AJAX Bookmarks to Your Rails Application (Part 2 of 2)

25 Nov 2009 — eric

In part 1 of this series, we discussed the base models, controller, database migrations necessary to get this project off the ground. Now we are going to continue with this functionality

Let’s take a look at what needs to go into the models to support this. If you have a model that uses a slug generated via to_param, then your code will look like the top model, If you are using the normal numeric id convention, then it will look like the bottom model. The reason for the specifically named methods get_title and get_description will become apparent when you start displaying bookmarks. The thought process is that you can use a consistent set of calls for displaying the bookmark information and put the code to grab that information in the model where it belongs rather than loading up the helper methods. What should also be noted is that the title and description fields are not always consistent across models. Therefore the method naming conventions returns the proper column with consistent method names.
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Adding AJAX Bookmarks to Your Rails Application (Part 1 of 2)

23 Nov 2009 — eric

It you want to add the ability to bookmark pages in your Rails application, its actually a fairly straightforward thing to do. You can even do them in AJAX. There may be better ways to do this, but this way is somewhat abstract and it works for me, so hopefully it can work for you too. It is abstract in the sense that it will work for models with different URL styles and different column names.

The way this works is that you add a bookmark icon (which is initially disabled) to a show <model_name> page. When the user clicks on the bookmark icon, an AJAX query will be made in the background and update the users bookmark lists. I am approaching this from an abstract methodology. Meaning that I have “forced” these methods to work with models executed in various fashions (as I give examples of below). The AJAX call is going to be simply work as a toggle. It will actually call a toggle method in the bookmarks controller and change the current value and replace the image. The user can then view the pages they have bookmarked in their profile.

I have decided to break this into a multi-part blog entry because it ends up being quite long. Not necessarily in how long it takes, just the amount of space it takes to show all the code. I have done my best to only show relevant code and maintain brevity. Note: I will not cover how to allow for unobtrusive AJAX calls. That is beyond the scope of this set of posts.
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One Time Modal Windows With Rails and Fancybox

3 Nov 2009 — eric

Let’s say that you have a situation that you want to have a modal window show up only once for each user. It’s actually not that difficult although lots of Googling around got me nowhere. I am choosing to use FancyBox for my modal window, but feel free to use your modal framework of choice. So let’s get down to business.

First thing you’ll need to do is download FancyBox and copy the stylesheets, images, and Javascript files to their proper/desired location in your Rails app. Style the window according to your likings.

Whether it is right or wrong, I did this entirely in the view, without even pulling the Javascript out into the application.js (or even another Javascript file for that matter). My reason was that I only want the modal window showing up on this page. If you want your modal window to show up somewhere else (or on every page), then put the code in your layout. But remember that this call will be executed every time the page loads. I put mine in a profile page which doesn’t get accessed that often so the conditional is not checked quite as frequently.

My application uses Facebook Connect and grabs the users Facebook Proxy email address (FB app developers will know what this is). So I check if that’s the email I have for the user. If yes, then I pop up a modal window on page load only once to get their regular email address and possibly a password so they can login to their account without Facebook Connect if they want. When the modal window is shown, a variable is set in the cookie (note that this cookie is shared with authlogic for sessions) to ensure that the modal window isn’t shown again.
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Migrations Without belongs_to Or references

14 Oct 2009 — eric

Normally when do a database migration in Rails, when adding ownership from a model to another model, you use the concept of belongs_to or references:

  create_table :comments do |t|
    t.belongs_to :user
    t.references :post
  end

Interestingly enough, these methods are only available during the initial table creation. If you want to add a reference to a model that is created later, you have to do it the old fashioned way, by just adding a column:

   add_column :comments, :group_id, :integer

Doing it this way is clean, easy, and definitely meets the KISS principle. But I do find it interesting that one can’t add an association later in the game. Sometimes the Rails way is just KISS and adding the column by hand.

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