First there was the epic fail of release 2.3.6, that broke all HTML Helpers and forced the Rails XSS protection upon us. This release was immediately followed by 2.3.7 and 2.3.8. With my tests, this version was still enforcing Rails XSS and breaking helpers like “h”.

Rails 2.3.9, released last week, puts en end to this.

I just was about to upgrade, when i read this error: Textarea input silently truncated in 2.3.8!. The input of a textarea is truncated if the text entered consists of two lines or more with one of them quoted as the Rack middleware messes with the input.

I can confirm that this behavior still applies to 2.3.9.

It’s a shame, that all the talk is about Rails 3 with bugs like this in an older branch. I understand that this is a Rack problem but as it is already fixed in newer Rack versions, i cannot understand that the Rails team doesn’t bump the required Rack version respectively has no tests for problems like these.

So i’m hoping that Rails 2.3.10 sees the light of day anytime soon.

Anyway, as Rails 2.3.9 suddenly uses a new interpolation syntax for the translation files (“Hello {{name}}” becomes ” Hello %{name}”), here is a one-liner to update i18n files to the new syntax:

find . -iname "*.yml" -exec sed 's/{{\([^\{\}]*\)}}/%{\1}/g' -i {} \;

If you like some less escapism use xargs

find . -iname "*.yml"  | xargs sed 's/{{\([^{}]*\)}}/%{\1}/g' -i;

Commands need to be executed inside your locale directory.

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module ActionView
  module Helpers #:nodoc:
    module AssetTagHelper
      def image_path(source)
        compute_public_path(source, 'static_images')
      end
      alias_method :path_to_image, :image_path # aliased to avoid conflicts with an image_path named route
    end
  end
end

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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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RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.log "foobar"
# or
Rails.logger.log "blah"

outside a controller for logging.

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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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It seems, that passengers spawn method “smart” isn’t compatible with memcached. Within seconds on a lightly loaded server the cache gets corrupted big time.

I got better results with a newer memcache client (the ruby gem actually), but for that i need to remove the client from the rails vendor lib. Furthermore, under higher load there still where errors.

Only solution is to set the spawn method to conservative like so

RailsSpawnMethod conservative

Problem seems to be known in the Phusion and Rails teams.

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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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This time the following command brought it to life:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- \
  --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib \
  --with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include

Thanks to a bitter software engineer.

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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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# 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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