Thought Into Motion

2contenders Updates

Over the weekend we rolled out some new changes to the 2contenders website.  Most of the changes are visual.  Profile pages have been completely redone to show more information but also make it easier to navigate.    One the back-end we have started to roll up the user activity so that we can add in some graphs and show your activity versus the average user.  We feel that this will add to the competition element of the site.   Listed below is small list highlighting the big changes. 

New Features:

• New profile pages
• New direct messaging interface 
• Improved friends list with larger images and more information. 
• New random avatars for people who haven't posted a picture.  We were all getting annoyed with the grey box. 
• New user ranking based on the boxing weight classes. 

We are not done though!!   We are looking to finish up and roll out over the next 2 weeks some more new features.  

Upcoming Features:

• Twitter & Facebook integration
• User stats pages with graphs 
• A mini-widget for embedding battles into your sites. 

As always please feel free to send us any thoughts of suggestions at suggestions@2contenders.com

Thanks and let the battling begin.

 

mysql gem installation problems with osx

Recently we upgraded our development environments to rails 2.2.2.  All was good until we realized that they had removed the bundled mysql connection library and we needed to install the gem on our OSX boxes. 

After running the install command:

sudo gem install mysql

We received the following errors:

ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.
etc...

Google searches revealed so good solutions but none of them worked.  The most popular methods required us to change the mysql.c file, and that is not something I general like to mess with.   Given our reluctance to start messing with header files, we keep looking for they combination of command line options that would work knowing we always had the other posts to fall back on. 

Finally we came up with a command that worked without having to modify the mysql.c file.  If you are running into problems getting the gem installed and you don't want to mess with the mysql.c file please try the command below.   It worked for us:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib --with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Session Data Storing Not Storing?

So today I had to debug a problem I had with one of my clients applications.  In the session I was storing how a page was being sorted.   The problem was that the sort was not saving to the session properly.  My model was setup with a has_many relationship to another model.   It was in the second model that I was storing some information. But when I would retrieve it from the session the values were going back to the default.   Below is a example of how I was using the session.

sort.columns.set_id = 2

session[:sort] = sort

Now at the beginning of my list action I would pull back the sort from the session so I could compare the values.  

col_id = session[:sort].columns.set_id

I was expecting to get 2 when I checked the value of col_id.   Instead I got the default of 1.   It seems that the session was not saving the stored value for the column object.   I might be doing this wrong but I would have expected the columns model to persist the correct value as it was being accessed through the sort model and the sort model was being saved to the session.

To make a long story short, be careful what you store in your session, and always check your values before assuming they are right. 

Partial Component Rendering

Recently for a project I needed to integrate thickbox to display some content.   Shortly after I got thickbox working correctly I discovered that I needed to add authentication to the panel I was displaying. My problem was how to catch the intended url and then redisplay it after the user had logged in, oh and of course I wanted to do this all with AJAX.

Once I got the authentication call working correctly I ran into a problem with rendering the intended action back to the form within a single ajax call.   My first attempt was rendering a partial to a string and then passing the string back.  It looked something like this.

      rt = render :partial => "#{session[:intended_controller]}/#{session[:intended_action]#}"

      render :update do |page|

        page.replace_html 'modal_login', rt

      end

The problem with this attempt was that the partial required database calls and things that were being generated within the controllers action.   So what I really needed to do was call the other controllers action with the "params" hash from the original call.  

After looking through all the render helpers I stumbled across the render_component method.   This seems to do the trick.  Since I captured the original controller and action, I can simply call this and store the result in a variable.   So I changed my two lines to look like the following:

      rt = render_component :controller=> session[:intended_controller], :action => session[:intended_action]

      render :update do |page|

        page.replace_html 'modal_login', rt

      end

Now this generated call the controller and action, but I still had two problems.  My first problem was in passing the original "params" hash to the action.  My second problem occurred due to the component call causing a double render error.   The first problem is solved by adding another option to the render component call :params => session[:intended_params].  The second problem was solved when I found a bug ticket referencing the render_component_as_string method.  

After changing this last two things I was able to get controller action rendered correctly and returned to my thickbox window via ajax.  Below is the final code that I placed in my ajax authentication routine.

      rt = render_component_as_string(:controller=> session[:intended_controller], :action => session[:intended_action], :params => session[:intended_params])

      render :update do |page|

        page.replace_html 'modal_login', rt

      end