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.
Today, we’re diving into the Writebook project from ONCE.com by 37 Signals. I’ll take you through the code, showing you how it’s all put together. Whether you’re new to Ruby or have been at it for a while, you’ll find some cool tips and tricks in this walkthrough.
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.
Eight years ago, Rails 5 made the belongs_to association required by default. This solved a lot of problems with orphaned records in the database. But sometimes, you need to have an optional association, which may lead to situations that you don’t expect.
