On August 9th, Rails 7.2 was released, bringing a host of new features and improvements to the framework. Ten months ago, I demonstrated how to upgrade a Rails application from 7.0 to 7.1, which was well-received by the community. Today, I will take you through the process of upgrading OneTribe from Rails 7.1 to 7.2. This upgrade not only ensures compatibility with the latest Rails enhancements but also allows me to better understand new Rails functionalities and performance optimizations. Let’s dive into the upgrade process and explore what Rails 7.2 has to offer.

Fifteen years ago, in August 2009, I worked for a small network provider company. I was a junior developer, yes 15 years ago, junior devs didn’t become seniors in 3 months. We used Dolphin SmallTalk for our internal systems, and I had the task of creating a simple web application for our customers. Also in the summer, but 20 years ago in July 2004, David Heinemeier Hansson released the first version of Ruby on Rails. I watched this video, and my life has changed.

What comes in your mind when you have a task to make the first letter of a string uppercase? You might think about using capitalize method, or titleize method.

In one of my recent projects, we’ve been asked to ensure first capital letter in first and last name of a user. Sounds simple right? We’ve used Rails 7.1 normalization API together with String#titleize.

Among other great features of ActiveRecord in Rails, I find accepts_nested_attributes_for is one of the most useful. It was introduced in Rails 2.3 and allows you to save attributes on associated records through the parent.

If you are not familiar with accepts_nested_attributes_for method, I suggest you read the official documentation before reading this article.