2018
The Problems With Validating ActiveRecord Models And Why State Validation Is a Bad Idea
In the typical Rails application, you can find the most of the validations in the ActiveRecord models, which is nothing surprising - ActiveRecord models are used for multiple things. Whether it is a good thing, or a bad thing (in most cases it’s the latter) deserves a separate book or at least blog post-series as it’s not a simple problem, there is one specific thing that can cause a lot of issues that are difficult to solve and go beyond design decisions and ease of maintenance of the application, something that impacts the behavior of the model - the validations.
Read on →Rails And Conditional Validations In Models
Adding consents for accepting Terms of Service/Privacy Policies must have been a top popular feature in the majority of the applications due to enforcement of GDPR in May ;). From the technical aspects that GDPR requires, there is a proof of consent for processing the personal information. In that case, you need to have some actual attributes in the database that would confirm the fact that some user has indeed accepted Terms of Service/Privacy Policy.
Read on →2017
Do. Or do not. There is no try - Object#try considered harmful
Object#try is quite a commonly used method in Rails applications to cover cases where there is a possibility of dealing with a nil value or to provide flexible interface for handling cases where some kind of object doesn’t necessarily implement given method. Thanks to try, we may avoid getting NoMethodError. So it seems like it’s perfect, right? No NoMethodError exception, no problem?
2016
Decoding Rails Magic: How Does ActiveJob work?
Executing background jobs is quite a common feature in many of the web applications. Switching between different background processing frameworks used to be quite painful as most of them had different API for enqueuing jobs, enqueuing mailers and scheduling jobs. One of the great addition in Rails 4.2 was a solution to this problem: ActiveJob, which provides extra layer on top of background jobs framework and unifies the API regardless of the queue adapter you use. But how exactly does it work? What are the requirements for adding new queue adapters? What kind of API does ActiveJob provide? Let’s dive deep into the codebase and answer these and some other questions.
Read on →Decoding Rails Magic: How Does Calling Class Methods On Mailers Work
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that calling class methods on mailers work in Rails, even though you only define some instance methods in those classes? It seems like it’s quite common question, especially when you see the mailers in action for the first time. Apparently, there is some Ruby "magic" involved here, so let’s try to decode it and check what happens under the hood.
Read on →Refactoring Tips: Trade Conditionals For Type Delegation
Having some kind of type attribute in your models is a pretty common thing, especially in applications with more complex domain. How do you handle such cases? Is it with multiple conditionals / case statements in every method dealing with the type attribute? If you've been struggling with organizing and maintaing code for such use cases then say hello to your new friend: type delegation.
2015
Ember and ES7: decorators
ES6 introduced plenty of useful features such as modules, arrow functions, let variables, destructuring, classes and many more which made writing JS code much readable and enjoyable. Thanks to Babel, a JavaScript transpiler, it's been pretty painless to use them all in the applications. If you happen to develop EmberJS apps and use ember-cli, you don't probably think much about Babel or any transpilation as these features are a natural part of every Ember application. But the new features didn't end with ES6, we're going to have even more of them in ES7 (2016). Some of them can already be used, thanks again to Babel. In this blogpost I'm going to explore a very powerful concept which of decorators.
Read on →Model your domain with composed models
In many Rails applications the modeling is limited only to creating classes inheritng from ActiveRecord::Base which are 1:1 mapped to database tables. Having AR models like User and Project doesn't tell much about the domain of your application. Well, you can add some domain logic to the models but that way you will easily end up having giant classes with thousands lines of code, so let's just use models for database-related stuff only. Other option would be to create service objects for every usecase. That's a good and clean way, but it's merely the interaction layer between different parts of your application. You may end up easily with all logic encapsulated within service objects that will start looking more like procedural programming rather than proper OOP and not real domain API at all. The good news is that you can easily counteract it: time to use composed models.
2014
Rails: Useful Patterns
There've been a lot of discussions for several months about "The Rails Way" and problems associated with it - huge models with several thousands lines of code and no distinguishable responsibilities (User class which does everything related to users doesn't tell much what the app does), unmaintainable callback hell and no domain objects at all. Fortunately, service objects (or usecases) and other forms of extracting logic from models have become quite mainstream recently. However, it's not always clear how to use them all together without creating huge classes with tens of private methods and too many responsibilities. Here are some strategies you can use to solve these problems.
Read on →You don't (necessarily) need gem for that feature
You are working currently on that awesome app and just started thinking about implementing new feature, let's call it feature X. What's the first thing you do? Rolling your own solution or... maybe checking if there's a magical gem that can help you solve that problem? Ok, it turns out there's already a gem Y that does what you expect. Also, it does tons of other things and is really complex. After some time your app breaks, something is definitively not working and it seems that gem Y is responsible for that. So you read all the issues on Github, pull requests and even read the source code and finally find a little bug. You managed to do some monkeypatching first and then send pull request for a small fix and solved a problem, which took you a few hours. Looks like a problem is solved. And then, you try to update Rails to2 the current version. Seems like there's a dependency problem - gem Y depends on previous version of Rails...
Read on →Test Driven Rails - Part 2
Last time, in part 1, I was giving some advice about testing - why to test at all, which tests are valuable and which are not, when to write acceptance tests and in what cases aim for the maximum code coverage. It brought about some serious discussion about testing ideas and if you haven't read it yet, you should probably check (it) it out. Giving some general point of view about such broad topic like Test Driven Development / Behavior Driven Development is definetely not enough so I will try to apply these techniques by implementing a concrete feature. I wanted to choose some popular usecase so that most developers will have an opinion how they would approach it. In most applications you will probably need:
Read on →2013
Structuring Rails applications
There’ve been a lot of discussions recently about applying Object Oriented Programming in Rails applications, how ActiveRecord callbacks make testing painful and how Rails makes it hard to do OOP the right way. Is it really true? Rails makes everything easy - you can easily write terrible code, which will be a maintenance nightmare, but is also easy to apply good practices, especially with available gems. What is the good way then to extract logic in Rails applications and the best place to put it?
Read on →