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The default behavior for quite a long time was :hard_breaks in the textilize helper method in rails.

Hard Breaks means: All line breaks are turned into <br />’s.

Somebody changed the textilize helper in “actionpack-2.3.4/lib/action_view/helpers/text_helper.rb” in 2.3.4 and added the ability to pass some options but broke the default behavior here:

def textilize(text, *options)
        options ||= [:hard_breaks]
        # ...

Options will never be null.

I fixed this by monkey patching the module through the following code in config/initializers/textilizepatch.rb

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    module TextHelper
      def textilize(text, *options)
        options = [:hard_breaks] if options == nil || options.size == 0
 
        if text.blank?
          ""
        else
          textilized = RedCloth.new(text, options)
          textilized.to_html
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Such changes should be tested… *grml*

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The last Passenger update brought some good explanation off the problems regarding Passenger and memcache-client (see here).

Smart spawning of Passenger processes creates shared file descriptors. As the connections to memcached are sockets they are shared as well so data on them gets corrupted which is explained very nicely in the Passenger documentation: Example 1: Memcached connection sharing (harmful).

The solution presented there works like a charm. The reestablish_connection_to_memcached line is actually not more than CACHE.reset where CACHE is the reference to the memcache connection.

After that change, spawning methods smart-lv2 and smart will work in connection with environment.rb configured memcache connections.

Edit: As requested in the comments, a little example:

memcache_options = {
  :c_threshold => 10000,
  :compression => true,
  :debug => false,
  :namespace => 'some_ns',
  :readonly => false,
  :urlencode => false
}
 
CACHE = MemCache.new memcache_options
CACHE.servers = '127.0.0.1:11211'
begin
   PhusionPassenger.on_event(:starting_worker_process) do |forked|
     if forked
       # We're in smart spawning mode, so...
       # Close duplicated memcached connections - they will open themselves
       CACHE.reset
     end
   end
# In case you're not running under Passenger (i.e. devmode with mongrel)
rescue NameError => error
end

In this case, CACHE is the global constant that i use to access my memcache-client.

I guess you’ll need to do the same with the global Rails.cache object, but i’m not sure. Anyway, the above solution works for me.

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Ruby on Rails I18n infrastructure did a great job to internationalization in Rails applications. Most things work right out of the box.

Daily Fratze is fully internationalized and i wanted to use ordinal day numbers in the English version. Pity, there is no template for strftime that works that way.

As i already hat monkey patched a “t” method to all date and time related classes, i came up with the following solution:

Parallel to “en.yml” i now have “en.rb” in my locales folder which gets loaded in environment.rb via

config.i18n.load_path += Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'locales', '*.{yml,rb}')]

The en.rb files defines some procs as translation values like so:

{
  :'en' => {
    :date => {
      :formats => {
        :dmy_with_long_month              => lambda { |date| "%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y" },
      }
    },
    :time => {
      :formats => {
        :dmy_with_long_month                       => lambda { |date| "%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y" },        
        :dmy_with_full_day_and_long_month_and_time => lambda { |date| "%A, %B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y at %H:%M" }
      }
    }
  }
}

Used with the standard I18n tools you’ll end up with the string representation of the proc object. Useless

So time for monkeypatching like so:

module DateTimeSupport
  def t(format = nil)
    type = self.respond_to?(:sec) ? 'time' : 'date'
    formats = I18n.translate(:"#{type}.formats")
    format = formats[format.to_sym] if formats && formats[format.to_sym]
 
    I18n.localize(self, :format => format.respond_to?(:call) ? format.call(self) : format)
  end
end
 
class Time
  include DateTimeSupport
end
 
class Date
  include DateTimeSupport
end       
 
class DateTime
  include DateTimeSupport
end
 
class ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
  include DateTimeSupport
end

Code resides in a file in config/initializers and gets loaded automatically. It adds a t method to all date and time related classes. The method tries to look up the translation of format just like I18n/Simple does.

If it is proc, it gets called and then passed to I18n, otherwise it the original parameter is used.

That way the t method can use “dmy_with_long_month”, :dmy_with_long_month and any other arbitrary format like “%B %Y” that is not defined in any language file.

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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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The “x_sendfile” argument on the send_file method in Rails 2.1 is not well thought off as it has an impact in development mode also. I guess most Rails coders won’t have Apache proxying their mongrels in dev mode and so they don’t get to see any images or files but the plain path information.

I’ll guess i stay with the x_send_file solution as described here.

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