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Monthly Archives: November 2008

PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails 2.2.2

24-Nov-08

If you followed the instructions here and used the method named PDF::Writer (Austin Ziegler), you we’re out of luck when Rails 2.1 appeared.

With Rails 2.2.2 once again the rendering mechanism seems to have changed big time and my previous post on how to make the pdf/writer gem work with a custom template handler doesn’t work anymore.

With the help of Josh Peek i was able to fix this. He gave me the following code to enable a rpdf template handler with pdf-writer:

module ActionView # :nodoc:
  require 'pdf/writer'
  class PDFRender < ActionView::TemplateHandler
    PAPER = 'A4'
    include ApplicationHelper                     
    include ActionView::Helpers::TranslationHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper
 
    def self.call(template)
      "ActionView::PDFRender.new(self).render(template, local_assigns)"
    end
 
    def initialize(action_view)
      @action_view = action_view
    end
 
    # Render the PDF
    def render(template, local_assigns = {})
      @action_view.controller.headers["Content-Type"] ||= 'application/pdf'
 
      # Retrieve controller variables
      @action_view.controller.instance_variables.each do |v|
        instance_variable_set(v,
        @action_view.controller.instance_variable_get(v))
      end
 
      pdf = ::PDF::Writer.new( :paper => PAPER )
      pdf.compressed = true if RAILS_ENV != 'development'
      eval template.source, nil, ''
 
      pdf.render
    end
  end
end
 
ActionView::Template.register_template_handler 'rpdf', ActionView::PDFRender

Just drop this under config/initializers and you’re fine.

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RFC3339 revisited

13-Nov-08

Not just for ruby but also the corresponding formats for

Java

public static final SimpleDateFormat RFC3339_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ");

and for Oracle

SELECT to_timestamp_tz('1979-21-09T06:54:00+01:00','YYYY-MM-DD"T"HH24:MI:SSTZH:TZM') FROM dual
/

Oracle

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Ruby: Formatting time values as RFC3339

01-Nov-08

Times in RSS Feeds and the like are formatted as RFC3339 most of the time. You can save yourself from strftime by using

Time.now.xmlschema

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Turn off RoRs automatic timezone conversion for columns

01-Nov-08

I couldn’t find this in the documents, but Geoff Buesing showed me the hooks to turn off Ruby On Rails’ automatic timezone conversions for some columns of a model or a complete model:

# Turn it off for just some columns
class Picture < ActiveRecord::Base
 def self.skip_time_zone_conversion_for_attributes
   [:created_at, :published_at]
 end
end
 
# Turin it off for the whole model
class Picture < ActiveRecord::Base
 def self.time_zone_aware_attributes
   false
 end
end

Thanks a lot!

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