Yesterday I’ve encountered the irritating date problem in Rails. Please remember to restart Webrick when you change the date conversion constants or time conversion constants with the ‘merge!’ method:

On reload it merges the array again… You can never remove the ‘:default’ date with a merge…
*sigh*

This tip can save you a whole lot of time, because reloading doesn’t work

How nice of rails to make it easy to change the default date format that is used when
showing a date from the database.

Very easy. Simple writing:

outputs the date in my format.

All seems to work well, but a few days later. TODAY!! I found out my application wasn’t saving dates anymore.

The cause:

Rails uses the “:default” date definition to format the date when it builds an SQL statement. Well my MySQL version doesn’t seem to understand this date format.

For now I stay away from the :default date formatter.
I’ve changed my custom date_picker field so now it first formats the date with the date format before showing..

Btw. I found a possible solution and a remark that this has been solved for future rails version. You can find this info at, the rails date kit.

Well after trying to access a ruby class constant for the zillionth time with Class.CONSTNAME.
( Which btw. very nicely gives the error “Undefined Method Class.CONSTNAME”…)
I’ve decided to write this note on my blog…

Remember:

* kick * to my own butt..

Last day of my Holiday :(
Trying to write a unit test for my Rails application, I constantly got the error message below:

Very strange: the Unit Test I’ve written was generated and exactly the same as shown in the example in the “Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition” book.

Well I found a solution, but I still haven’t found the reason WHY this is happening. You can see this is as a temporary hack.

In your: “/test/test_helper.rb” add the following method:

Currently I’m busy developing a Rails Application. I’m busy developing some general classes that aren’t part of a model/controller or view. I placing these classes in the ‘lib’ directory.
Things are fine … well not quite …

The problem while developing is the libraries aren’t reloaded on each request. This is very frustrating when you are trying to write a library.

Some things I found (but don’t seam to work):

Rest the application in the console. Well the application reset, but not the libraries.

I assume the libraries directory is loaded in the ruby booting class loader. ( I’m still thinking Java ). So when Webrick starts these libs are loaded.
The models and controllers etc. are loaded by the rails class loader.

Somehow I need to reload the library in the rails class loader space…. Doesn somebody have a solution!?
Perhaps I should find another directory…

I will keep you informed if I find a solutions.

—

1 august 2007: Well found a solution for the problem, I even wonder if it really was a problem….. (shame on me)
If I place the class “MyOwnClass” in the file “lib/my_own_class.rb” without including the source file. (This isn’t required, because Rails automatically includes it) it seems to be refreshed every time I do a request…

Nice.. !