http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog Just another weblog Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:21:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en How many times have you felt like skipping validations on a particular model while writing rspec tests ? Last night, I was trying to write rspec tests for one of my models which tested transactions of money between two users. My user model has tens of validations and I ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/08/09/skip-validations/ If you are using Rails and Facebooker, and you have a resizable Iframe application and you are having problems with resizing, do the following: a) Make sure that the Iframe is set to Resizable in the Facebook appplication settings. b) Instead of calling just <%= init_fb_connect "XFBML" %> (as mentioned in all ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/07/24/facebook-iframe-application-resize-iframe/ I started developing a Facebook app for one of my existing websites.  Since, I already had a working website and I prefer normal html and js over fbml and JS over FBML and FBJS, I decided to take the IFrame route. While working with my app, I ran into this ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/07/24/facebooker-creating-an-iframe-application-incorrect-signature/ SMERF is the meta form generator plugin for Rails. The plugin I would say is very useful. It takes in a form definition file, defined in YAML and creates a form on the fly. These forms are associated to users and the responses to the forms are also persisted in ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/02/10/smerf-and-issues-with-mysql/ I was trying to center an element using the p tag. Like : <p style="margin-left:auto; magin-right:auto; width: 50 em;"> <%= show_simple_captcha %> </p> show_simple_captcha is a helper method from the simple captcha rails plugin. This view helper generates a div which helps in captcha validation. Now, this created a problem. This piece of code ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/01/28/div-inside-a-p-invalid-html/ If you are using action_mailer_tls rails pluin and you shifted to Ruby 1.8.7, your app might break. I recently ran into this problem, coz my host providers shifted to Ruby 1.8.7 and I started getting errors when I was trying to send emails. The problem is because the check_auth_args function ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2009/01/21/action_mailer_tls-and-ruby-187/ Recently, I started getting weird "LoadError" with my Rails app on Dreamhost. I had an "Article" model which contained many "Photo" models. When the "Article" controller tried to refer to the photos in its object, I got the following error: LoadError: Expected {full server path}/photo.rb to define Photo. I had ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2008/12/31/ruby-187-stringchars-compatibility-problem-with-rails/ How does one insert comments in an erb file. The normal http tag to insert comments do not work well when there are embedded ruby statements in the html. <!-- <b>Hello</b><%= @article.author %> --> The above statement will not stop the evaluation of article.author. Instead, @article.author will still be evaluated and placed ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2008/12/31/insert-comments-in-an-erb-file/ RFeedParser is one of the ruby gems to parse rss feeds. Its a translation of Mark Pilgrims's Universal Feed Parser from Python into Ruby. It has a few dependencies and requires you to install a few other gems. The installation instructions are simple and the usage is simple. One of the ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2008/11/15/rfeedparser-and-hpricot/ I was recently reading the book Learning Jquery by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg . After reading the chapter on Rotators and Shufflers, which shows how you can create a headline rotator, I decided to implement one for my own website, adevelopedworld.com. adevelopedworld.com is a website which features social entrepreneurs ... http://balpreetpankaj.com/blog/2008/11/02/creating-a-headline-rotator/