Will_paginate and AJAX
I have been using will_paginate ever since I started on Rails.
It's a great plugin for classic page rendering, but what if you want to use it with AJAX, so it updates a document element (a floating window layer, for instance) with the results instead of reloading the page?
Well, inspired on Redline's blog post (which almost worked for the latest version of the will_paginate plugin), I have the solution.
Create a link renderer. I put in under lib/remote_link_renderer.rb so Rails always loads it on startup.
class RemoteLinkRenderer < WillPaginate::LinkRenderer
def page_link_or_span(page, span_class = 'current', text = nil)
text ||= page.to_s
if page and page != current_page
@template.link_to_remote(text, {:url => url_for(page), :method => :get}.merge(@remote))
else
@template.content_tag :span, text, :class => span_class
end
end
endOn the view, when you are rendering the pager, do it like this:
<%= will_paginate @collection, :renderer => 'RemoteLinkRenderer' , :remote => {:with => ’value’, :update => ‘some_div’} %>That's it!
How to paginate outside of the database with will_paginate
will_paginate is a great plugin. I have been using it since I started on Rails.
If you want to paginate records that are inside your database it works great.
But what if you want to paginate records that come from, say an external webservice?
Well, you can use the WillPaginate::Collection class.
This class will let you mimic the collection that will work on a pager, so you can use the view helper pager seamlessly throughout your app.
Just use it like this:
@entries = WillPaginate::Collection.create(1, 10) do |pager|
result = Webservice.get(...) # get your results
# inject the result array into the paginated collection:
pager.replace(result)
unless pager.total_entries
# the pager didn't manage to guess the total count, do it manually
pager.total_entries = result.count
end
end
Tools for the job
Here are some tools / gems / plugins I can't live without:
IDEs:
- Aptana Rad Rails - very good at Rails and Ruby. It's based on Eclipse - Java - so it tends to bloat
- gedit- Tiny footprint, simple. Great for web and PHP with the right plugins and conf tweaks
Ruby / Rails plugins:
Tutorial: building and styling a Rails app with styled_objects
How to keep your stylesheets clean and organized using Rails
This tutorial covers building a web application from scratch using Rails with the styled_objects plugin.
styled_objects Rails plugin
Yesterday I released the styled_objects Rails plugin.
styled_objects is a Rails plugin for simplifying stylesheet management on your application.
Rails cache in distributed environment
Page and fragment caching are life-savers for Rails application scalability. Specially for page cache, they can make your app fast, specially if you use a webserver like Nginx, serving static files directly without touching the Rails stack.
But maintaining cache consistency across a distributed Rails application can be challenging.
Capistrano deploying full text search on Rails using acts_as_xapian
acts_as_xapian is a rails plugin for Xapian, a full text search engine.
acts_as_xapian installs the search engine database inside the plugin directory, under xapiandbs. If you use Capistrano as a deployment tool and since the entire codebase is rewritten (including the plugin directory), you will have to rebuild the entire index every time you do a deployment.