I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with Lowpro lately, so expect to see some posts about that in the near future.

This will indicate when a password does not meet the validation criteria defined in the model. You can add custom validations to check the strength of the password itself.

Today I started using a new trick. Google has recently released MacFUSE. The neat thing here is that you can also download the sshfs file system and use it to mount an SSH server as a network drive.

Needless to say, this works like a charm with Rubyforge. Just fire up the sshfs.app file after installing the MacFUSE core and the sshfs.app bundle.

It will ask you for a server, type ‘rubyforge.org’. Enter your rubyforge id as well, and for the directory, enter something like

It will ask you for a password, and then like magic, your rubyforge filespace will be mounted like a drive. Now you have no excuse for not putting some documentation or a spiffy web page up there.

Incidentally, once the connection is established, you can quit the ’sshfs.app’ program. There are also instructions on the Google code web page that tell you how to use this from the command line. The mounted rubyforge.org drive will also be accessible from the command line as ‘/Volumes/rubyforge.org

For now, if you need access, send me an email and I will send you a zip file of the plugin you require.

Thanks,
Kevin

1. go to Rails Google co-op
2. right click on the search box.
3. select ‘Add keyword for this search’
4. fill out the resulting form and add a keyword like ‘rails’
5. move focus to the address bar (CMD-L on a Mac)
6. Type ‘rails sciwerks’ on the address bar

You can also do this with rails or ruby API methods.

You could also set up a quicksilver web search for this too.

To make this a little easier, I picked up a Belkin Flip, which is easily the best and easiest KVM switch I have ever used. There seems to be a minor issue with my mac not quite recognizing the monitor when connected through it, but I’m working on that.

I also just won a copy of Hal Fulton’s ‘The Ruby Way’ at tonight’s Raleigh Ruby Meetup. Now I have something to read over the break. Perhaps I will also find time to review it as well.

I don’t really like this approach because I don’t want to clutter up the session with various form parameters. Thankfully, there is a simple way to do this by once again abusing the built in text_field_with_auto_complete function…

[In my case, I used the :extra data to exclude certain objects from the auto_complete_for response]

By passing the :url option, you rewrite the URL that the AJAX actions call, enabling you to add extra parameters that can be acted on by the method. Also note that you can change the name of the action called (in fact, you need to specify it or it will default to the name of the action for the current view… probably not what you want). This is handy because it lets you assign the response to a variable with a different name without writing a separate auto_complete_for handler. In this case, the submitted form will have a ‘new_object[name]‘ in the params, even though the action called was ‘auto_complete_for_object_name’.

Needless to say, you need to write a custom ‘auto_complete_for’ method to handle the extra data. Note that you could also use this method to handle multiple auto_complete fields.

The standard rails approach to handling form validation errors is to spit out a long list of all validation errors in a box at the top of the form. The problem with this approach is that there is a separation between the list of errors and the field that spawned them, like this.

This can be a bit annoying, particularly in a long form where the error message and the offending form field may not appear on the screen at the same time. Notice that you have to first read the error message, and then read the titles of all the fields to find the offending one(s) that need to be corrected. They aren’t even in the same order as they were specified in the form, which makes it even more confusing. This is just extra work for the user, particularly if your form is long or complex.

One way to address this problem is to put the appropriate error message right next to the field with the error. This way, it’s pretty obvious where the problems are, and even what they are. You can also generally avoid using the name of the field in the message.
A simple example of this might look like this….

This still isn’t pretty, but at least the user knows exactly which fields need correcting, and a little CSS magic can even place the message to the right of the offending field.

So how do we implement this?

Simple… first go into your view and delete the

line.

Then stick this in your application helper.

Then in your form view, add an ‘error_for’ call wherever you need one…

If the model fails a validation test, then it will show the message right next to the field that caused the validation problem.
Also note that if you define an instance variable called @errors containing a hash of field_names and messages, they will also be used. This is handy for those form fields that don’t correspond to a model attribute.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will describe a how to make these error message dynamic with AJAX.

This technique is clearly one to keep an eye on for a good user experience. It is not yet clear to me when this type of interface can be used for maximal benefit, and when conventional paging should be the preferred method.

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Yes, that is really me.