Paolo's Ruby Discovery

Shoulda testing for xml services??

presmini — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:25:09 +0000

so you want to be all ruby, and build out a good suite of tests right? no problem for testing http calls…in fact there’s a lot of built in support for this. But what about xml web services calls? I struggled to find how to use the testing suite properly. First I was just making the calls explicitly…but this doesn’t scale well:
setup do @uri = URI.parse("https://www.somesite.com/v1/authenticate.xml") @http = Net::HTTP.new(@uri.host, @uri.port) @http.use_ssl = true @http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE< @xmlbody="XML CODE HERE" end

should "have authentication error when using random auth_token" do @uri.query = "auth_token=#{rand.to_s}" @request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(@uri.request_uri) response = @http.request(@request) parser = LibXML::XML::Parser.string(response.body) @root = parser.parse.root assert_not_nil(@root.find_first('//envelope/body/errors/error')) end

That code works, but it causes a lot of headaches in that you can’t move from local server to remote server easily. Then I found this:

@request.env['RAW_POST_DATA'] = "XML BODY GOES HERE" xml_http_request(:post, :action, :format='xml', ...)

In TestCases, this will set most of the necessary request env variables for you to ensure an xml call, but make sure you add the “:format” option to the call. This will ensure if you use a “responds_to” on the controller side, that the correct format route will be used. After calling xml_http_request (you can also use the alias “xhr”), you’ll have an @response variable that you can parse and manipulate like the original example.

Good luck!

inject! – the beauty and craziness of ruby

presmini — Tue, 04 May 2010 05:40:37 +0000

OK…so the ability to do stuff succinctly is pretty cool. But I’m still getting used to reading the stuff. Here’s a great example:

[1, 2, 3, 4].inject(0) { |result, element| result + element }

who would guess this results in: 10

So how does it work? Well, inject is a pretty cool method that allows you to recursively work on an enumerable object. Although it’s pretty powerful, it’s taking this Java programmer some getting used to. Here’s a great article that goes into a bit of detail. Enjoy!

Ruby: inject

New Macbook Pro = mysql gem problem!

presmini — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:14:30 +0000

I just got my brand new i7 mac book pro. It’s SWEEEET! That being said it totally screwed up my mysql gem installation. When I tried to do a “rake reload” I ended up with an error like:

uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes

another error may be something like:

undefined method `real_connect’ for Mysql:Class

Turns out it has to do with how the gem was originally installed. now that I have a zooming fast 64-bit chip, I need to install the gem with some different flags. Here’s a good answer to the problem: answer that worked for me

Enjoy!

Passenger + nginx + SSL

presmini — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:54:41 +0000

I went to go to my newly created SSL site in nginx, and apparently I didn’t compile in the ssl module..go figure….a little pain in the butt that you have to recompile each time! But oh well. Here’s a link to instructions on how to get it set up right the first time:

Passenger+nginx+SSL

nginx – getgrnam (“presmini”) failed

presmini — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:52:17 +0000

I got this error after installing nginx and trying to run passenger for my ruby apps. I understood that I needed to run nginx as the same user I was using to run my ruby apps. To do this, I had to use the “user” directive in the nginx.conf file to define the startup user to be “presmini” (the same user running my ruby apps). What I screwed up was that the failure

[emerg]: getgrnam(“presmini”) failed in /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf:1

is that I wasn’t explicity defining a group in the nginx.conf file, and so it was defaulting to something that does exist. Since I’m on a mac, I just changed the “user” directive in the nginx.conf file to:

user presmini staff

wala! Works great!!

Hello Ruby World!

presmini — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:45:45 +0000

Hello to all. This is going to be a blog about my discoveries of Ruby. Mainly going to be a place where I keep notes about what went wrong, common newbie errors, etc. (Basically, if I smashed my head against my desk for hours…I’m hoping to help someone else learn from my mistake).

Enjoy if you’d like.