How to use thor with the latest version of merb

November 26th, 2009 • Merb, programming, thor • No comments

The latest version of thor (0.12.0) doesn’t work with the latest version of merb (1.0.15).

To use thor with your merb 1.0.15 app, you need to install thor -v0.9.9 and then follow the instructions on this page: http://wiki.merbivore.com/deployment/bundling

Merb Gem Cleanup

November 25th, 2009 • DataMapper, Merb, OS X, Ruby, programming • No comments

It seems to be a common issue for us Merbists, who depend on multiple Gems for merb to play nicely to get into a bit of a mess as gems are updated.

So, at times a cleanup is in order. Here is what i’ve done to cleanup my merb setup:

$ sudo gem update --system
$ gem search --no-version merb | grep merb | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of merb
$ gem search --no-version dm | grep dm | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_mapper
$ gem search --no-version data_objects | grep data_objects | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_objects
$ sudo gem sources -c
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/merb* # PATH_TO_GEMS is the path to your rubygems install.  Mine is /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/dm*
$ sudo gem install -r merb

This was taken from the meb installation instructions at: http://wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/gems

Call TextMate from command line

September 7th, 2009 • Apple, Mac, TextMate, programming, software development • 2 comments

A really neat feature of TextMate is the ability to call it from the command line and pass a directory or file as the object to open. Works great.

For this to work, you need to run a quick one-liner on the command line:

sudo ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate /usr/local/bin/mate

Once done, you can call mate and pass it any object you want to open, such as:

$ mate my_rails_app

and it opens the entire directory as if it were a TextMate project.

Lots more detail available here: http://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal.html

Using Cucumber, Webrat and Selenium to test ajax form field validations

September 4th, 2009 • Cucumber, Internet, JavaScript, Merb, Ruby, Webrat, programming • 2 comments

I have an app that fires an ajax request on a form field to validate its contents when I take focus off the field.

I am also using Cucumber, Webrat and Selenium for my integration tests.

I needed my integration tests to test the Ajax responses and the tests weren’t receiving a response from the Ajax requests.

The Problem

I found that by simply completing the web form, the ajax request was not being fired and my test was therefore failing when i checked for the existance of the Ajax response. It soon became clear that selenium doesn’t really interact with the form in the sense of selecting fields and entering values; It simply enters values. As such, the Ajax request was not firing and my test was failing.

The Solution

The solution is Selenium’s fireEvent method, which you can pass a form field id and the blur method:

selenium_session.fireEvent(”field”, “blur”);

In Webrat, this is ever simpler:

fire_event(”field”,”blur”)

On using this in a Cucumber step, the ajax is fired as the blur command tells the browser to take focus off the field.

Lovely!

Setting up Merb, Cucumber and Webrat (and friends) on Snow Leopard

September 4th, 2009 • Cucumber, Mac, Merb, OS X, Ruby, Webrat, bdd, programming, software development • 2 comments