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Last time, I promised that we’d make our testimonial application more friendly for users and less so for spammers and that’s what we’re going to do today, among other things of course. Let’s get’r done!

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

I was reading the Pickaxe book today, brushing up on my Ruby skills and came across a passage that had me thinking about how our approach to programming affects our job and career. It started simply enough, explaining Ruby boolean expressions

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.

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Filed under: General

It just occurred to me that I never mentioned how to log in to the testimonial demo application. If you would like to play with the admin interface, such as it is, you will have to login as the user demo using the password demo. Feel free to add, delete, approve, and unapprove testimonials but please leave at least one testimonial approved.

Oh, one last thing… the admin portions are still ugly and in most cases in their default scaffold state but an update is in the works and coming soon.

Thanks!

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Filed under: Rails, walkthrough