Authorization plugin addon

Hi ppl,

If you are using Authorization plugin (http://www.writertopia.com/developers/authorization) you can easily extend your ApplicationHelper with all benefits of authorization plugin.

Perhaps we have user "doomer" logged in, who have two roles > "tester" and "translator"
So regularly in some controller/action we can do:
current_user.has_role?("tester") // true
or
current_user.has_role?("admin") // false

and so on.
This is very nice usage of authorization stuff ! A big respect to billkatz and glenn.rempe.
However we want to ease usage of current....("admin") queries
We can do the following:
in application_helper

module ApplicationHelper
def tester?
current_user.has_role?("tester")
end
def admin?
current_user.has_role?("admin")
end
end

those methods will return true or false depends on user permission, but if we have 5+ roles ? +10 ? let me say its very dirty and wet way..

So lets do it:
open application.rb

def assign_roles
return if !logged_in?
for role in Role.find(:all, :select => "name", :group => "name")
 r = current_user.has_role?(role.name)
 c = "def #{role.name}?() #{r} end"
 ApplicationHelper.module_eval(c)
 logger.info "PARSED ROLE #{role.name}"
end
end

And for the last, put before_filter :assign_roles in begin of application.rb
Thats it !!
Okay what we did here ? >>
1. return if current_user isnt logged in (plugin method)
2. find all roles & create local r with true/false, depends on permission
3. create def code for ApplicationHelper and eval it.
We created exactly the same as above sample but much more dynamic & DRY !!

Thats all, have a fun usage !!!

p.s. an authorization plugin usage/download available here:
http://www.writertopia.com/developers/authorization
or from GIT:
http://github.com/DocSavage/rails-authorization-plugin/tree/master

ADDON--
If you want those helper methods to be available to controllers(because you CANT call helper method from controller) just add:
ApplicationController.module_eval(c)
under ApplicationHelper.module_eval(c)

This will create application controller methods (def admin? false end)

Encoding problems

First dump initial, non-utf database:

mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset dbname > dumpfile.sql

then (linux) change all latin1 in dumpfile.sql to utf8

sed 's/latin1/utf8/g' dumpfile.sql > dumpfile_collate_utf8.sql

Optionally gzip and send to localpc
gzip -d dumpfile_collate_utf8.sql.gz


Recreate same database with utf8 collation and import dumpfile_collate_utf8:

mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD --execute="DROP DATABASE dbname;
    CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"
mysql -uUSER dbname < dumpfile_collate_utf8.sql

Now the next part, get on Rails

I've set RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.1.6' to be sure we are in non unicode.
1. Create controller with:

require 'iconv'
require 'singleton'
class ConverterController < ApplicationController
end

Inside create two actions:

  def convertme
    rows = Model.find(:all)
    for row in rows
      row.title = iconvert(row.title, "latin1", "utf8")
      # replace latin1 with appropriate encoding
      row.save!
    end
  end

  def iconvert(str, encoding_from, encoding_to = "utf8")
    i = Iconv.new encoding_to, encoding_from
    utf_str = ""
    begin
      utf_str << i.iconv(str)
    rescue Exception => e
      utf_str << e.success
      ch, str = e.failed.split(//, 2)
      utf_str << "?"
      logger.info "FAIL !! char:#{ch}"
      retry
    end
    return utf_str
  end

Point browser/console to /converter !

Thats IT !
What doing iconvert: its taking string, trying to convert it to utf-8, if conversion fails (on some japanese/korean) it put "?" instead. Thats because some non-utf encoding cannot be converted to utf-8(needs to be utf-16 or utf-32).

Also in case of large database conversion, i suggest to add column to database table, like "utf_converted" and do conditionally find(:all) and then row.utf_converted = true before save, just to be safe if something fail, to do not convert twice.

Rails 2.0 :: Debugger

To tie it all together, we have a stream of improvements for Rails in general. My favorite amongst these is the return of the breakpoint in form of the debugger. It’s a real debugger too, not just an IRB dump. You can step back and forth, list your current position, and much more. It’s all coming from the gracious note of the ruby-debug gem. So you’ll have to install that for the new debugger to work.

To use the debugger, you just install the gem, put “debugger” somewhere in your application, and then start the server with —debugger or -u. When the code executes the debugger command, you’ll have it available straight in the terminal running the server. No need for script/breakpointer or anything else. You can use the debugger in your tests too.

More on Rails 2.0

Rails 2.0 :: Migrations

As you may know Rails 2.0 is on the way (however there will be several RC's), but there is new format of migration:
Before you’d write:

create_table :people do |t|
  t.column, "account_id",  :integer
  t.column, "first_name",  :string, :null => false
  t.column, "last_name",   :string, :null => false
  t.column, "description", :text
  t.column, "created_at",  :datetime
  t.column, "updated_at",  :datetime
end

Now you can write:

create_table :people do |t|
  t.integer :account_id
  t.string  :first_name, :last_name, :null => false
  t.text    :description
  t.timestamps
end

More on Rails 2.0