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Somehow, we overlooked the user’s name when we created the schema for the testimonial leaving us only the email address to use as an attribution. Fortunately Rails’ migrations makes it trivial to add the new field. Drop into the shell and generate a migration:

script/generate migration AddUserName
     create  db/migrate
     create  db/migrate/004_add_user_name.rb
end

Open that in your editor, and make it look like the following. I think 64 characters is long enough to hold a name for this app.

class AddUserName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :testimonials, :name, :string, :limit => 64
  end  
	
  def self.down
    remove_column :testimonials, :name
  end
end

Alright, now we’ve added a place to store the user’s name.; we’ll let ActiveRecord handle the CRUD for us but it’s still our task to ask the user to enter their name. To that end, we need to edit the form that is used to edit a testimonial. We factored that out of the add view into a partial named _form.rhtml. Let’s ask for our customer’s name before we ask them to give up their email address, that seems more neighborly, don’t you think? At the top of the form, add the following:

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Filed under: Rails, walkthrough

Ruby has a simple definition of truth. Any value that is not nil or the constant false is true.

But then it got worse:

However, C, C++ and Perl programmers sometimes fall into a trap. The number zero is not interpreted as a false value. Neither is a zero-length string. This can be a tough habit to break.

Read more…

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Filed under: General