Ten Things You Didn't Know Rails Could Do

Presenter: James Edward Gray II (@jeg2)

Bio

James (@JEG2) has been a Rails programmer for about as long as it has been fashionable to be one and a Rubyist even longer than that. As you probably know from listening to him on the Ruby Rogues podcast, James loves to dig into how our community and code works.

Abstract

Rails is huge. Even if you have worked with it for a long time, it's unlikely that you have stumbled across everything yet.

Do you really know what all of the built-in Rake tasks do? Have you seen all of the methods ActiveSupport makes available to you? Are you aware of all the queries ActiveRecord is capable of?

In this talk, I'll dig into the extras of Rails and see if I can't turn up some features that you don't see all of the time, but that might just be handy to know about anyway. I'll make sure you come out of this able to impress your friends at the hackfest.

Notes

Really, 42 things.

From @james_gary

TODO

From @benjaminoakes

• Who
  • He's on Ruby Rogues
  • Rubyist for 8 years
  • Ruby code/documentation
  • CSV
• Rails 3.2.3
• Rails app in a single file
• rake notes for TODO, FIXME, OPTIMIZE
  • rake notes:custom ...
  • TextMate bundle
• Sanbox rails console
  • DB changes reverted
  • rails c --sandbox
• Helper methods in console
  • helper objecdt
• Non-webrick servers in dev: rails s thin
• In Railties: tap into config
  • require first

Database

• Migration shorthand
  • string by default, limits in {})
  • Indexes at command line name:index
  • Associations: user:references or user:belongs_to, column, add_index, and association (belongs_to)
  • rake db:migrate:status tells you whether a migration is applied
• CSV
  • Import CSV data (see slide). @jeg2 gets this all the time
  • CSV in database (use load and dump for serialize)
• Pluck
  • Foo.select(;email).map(&:email) same as Foo.pluck(:email)
• Records in groups:
  • Foo.group(:bar).count

From @danbernier

TODO

External Links

• Friday hugs