Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

Sitting thrugh my first tutorials session at RailsConf we’ve come across an interesting discussion about the philosophy of using the ‘Presenter Pattern’ to refactor code in your applications controller.

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Ok so I’m having a slight problem building my CMS for a client. I want to utilize the same model to handle the photos for their case studies as well as their services. Each has their own model. So the Photo model belongs to a Project or a Service. But in reality it belongs to a project OR a service. Thus I have a problem using acts_as_list.

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :service
  belongs_to :project

  acts_as_taggable
  acts_as_list :scope => :project_id

  file_column :image, :magick => { :versions => { "thumb" => "50x50", "medium" => "640x480>" } }
end

If I could do something like:

acts_as_list :scope => :project_id || :service_id

Then this would be a piece of cake but it’s not that easy. How would you solve this? I know it’s not that challenging.

Generating an excel document is not so difficult to achieve but limited unfortunately. You cannot write formulas or generate charts via the existing available tools but you can achieve usable results overall. Here is a snippet I used to generate sales forecasts involving data pulled together from two active record objects. Here is the gem you’ll need.

• Update: the link I was posting to prior points to a new Ruby project. The correct link can be found here.

  # Builds an excel report.
  def report
    # Grab time span for report
    get_span

    # Define stats levels to include.
    status = %w(high medium low lost won)

    # Create workbook.
    file = "#{session[:user_id]}_#{Time.now.strftime("%m%d%G%s")}_forecast.xls"
    workbook = Excel.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/reports/#{file}")

    heading = Format.new(
       :color     => "green",
       :bold      => true,
       :underline => true
    )

    data = Format.new(
       :color     => "black",
       :bold      => false,
       :underline => false
    )

    workbook.add_format(heading)
    workbook.add_format(data)

    # Cycle through each status level
    status.each do |status|
      start_column, start_row = 2, 3
      worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet(status)
      opportunities = get_opportunities_that_are(status)

      #Cycle through the opportunities
      row = start_row
      totals, dates = [], []

      for opp in opportunities
        worksheet.write(row,start_column,opp.client,heading)

        column = start_column + 1
        opp.find_forecasts_within(@span[0],@span[-1]).each do |i|
          worksheet.write(row,column,i.volume,data)
          totals[column] = i.volume + totals[column].to_i
          dates[column] = i.date.strftime("%b '%y")
          column += 1
        end    

        row += 1
      end

      # Generate the totals row and monthly headings
      column = start_column+1
      @span.length.times do
        worksheet.write(row,column,totals[column],heading)
        worksheet.write(start_row-1,column,dates[column],heading)
        column += 1
      end

    end

    workbook.close
    redirect_to :action => 'show'
  end

I recently coded a basic statistics applicaiton for a client that offers a website affiliate program. I thought it might be worth sharing how easy it is to code this type of software in Rails. Keep in mind this is extremely basic but never the less a good illustration of how to tackle a cumbersome project relatively easily.

Decide what to track.

For this client all we needed to track were the number of actual page impressions, the amount of clicks, and the actual amount of unique visitors going to a specific users account.

Playing Big Brother.

Watching visitor activity and logging it is easy. I created a model for hits, clicks, and visits. There is a parent model to all of these called ‘User’. So here’s how I broke down the relationships:

• Hits belong to users.
• Visits belong to users.
• Clicks belong to both users and visitors.

Below is the code that logs the click through information and sends the user off on their happy way. It basically takes an id and a path so a typical link would look like: http://www.domain.com/send_to/id/encoded_url_path_to_redirect_to

  def send_to

    if @user = User.find(:first, :conditions => ["name=?",@params[:id].to_s.upcase])

      # Get parameter info...
      url = params[:path].to_s
      ip = request.remote_ip

      # Log the click information.
      click = Click.new
      click.url = url
      @user.clicks < < click

      # Log the visitor information.
      visitor = Visitor.create_if_new_today(ip,@user.id)
      visitor.clicks < < click

      # Log the hit.
      hit = Hit.new
      @user.hits < < hit

      if @user.save
        redirect_to url
      end

    end

It should be worth noting that I’ve decided to track where every click is redirecting too. I’ve also decided to track every click as a hit for the user as well as technically it is an impression.

Logging unique visitor information as well as the page impression itself (the hit) is easy too as seen below.

  def index

    if params[:id] == 'nonexistent'
      params[:id] = 'admin'
    end

    if @user = User.find(:first, :conditions => ["name=?",params[:id].to_s.upcase])
      # Log the hit.
      hit = Hit.new
      @user.hits < < hit

      # Log the visitor information.
      ip = request.remote_ip
      visitor = Visitor.create_if_new_today(ip,@user.id)
      @user.visitors < < visitor

      @time = Time.now
      @user_id = params[:id].to_s.upcase

  	else
  	  redirect_to(:controller => 'show', :id =>'nonexistent')
  	end

  end

Grabbing the stats.

Once you’ve logged the stats pulling them via rails is a piece of cake. I wrote a protected function inside of my report controller to pull the hits, clicks, and visits for a specific time length and return them in a hash.

  # Display user stats.
  def report
    @time = Time.now
    @user = User.find(session[:user_id])
    @todays = stats(@user,1.days.ago)
    @last_weeks = stats(@user,1.weeks.ago)
    @last_months = stats(@user,4.weeks.ago)
    @records = transactions
  end

  protected

  # Generates a hash containing hits, visitors, and clicks from the past.
  def stats(user,time)
    clicks = user.clicks.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    hits = user.hits.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    visitors = user.visitors.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    return { :hits => hits, :visitors => visitors, :clicks => clicks }
  end

This is nifty… check out this file_column behavior for Ruby on Rails. Wow that looks damn easy.

Today “Ruby on Rails 1.0″:http://www.rubyonrails.org/ was finally released. There were two final release candidates that popped up over the last two weeks so I’m not surprised to see it here today. But what is surprising is the entire redesign of the Rails website. Check out “David’s post”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2005/12/13/rails-1-0-party-like-its-one-oh-oh to learn more about 1.0!

If you’re interested in starting up a Rails application of your own I recommend looking into grabbing an account at “Site5″:http://www.site5.com, “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com, or “TextDrive”:http://www.textdrive.com as they all offer stable shared hosting environments for Rails and should be upgrading their servers to 1.0 in the next couple of days if they haven’t already!