Here's a little snippet of code to put in lib/adapter_connection.rb of your RAILS_ROOT to be able to obtain the true connection and start binding and escaping.

# this will grant access to the true database connection which is hidden
# in the current ConnectionAdapter.
#
module AdapterConnection
  def get_true_connection
    adapter = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

    # when we cannot get the TRUE connection yet, make it so
    unless adapter.respond_to?(:get_connection)
      klass = adapter.class
      klass.class_eval do
        def get_connection
          @connection
        end
      end
    end

    # return the TRUE connection
    adapter.get_connection
  end
end

Be aware that the way binding occurs differs for different database drivers so you should be pretty sure this is the only way, since it isn't very portable!

Now in your model you would want to add the following lines of code:

class MyModel << ActiveRecord::Base

  include AdapterConnection

  def my_tailored_query
    conn = get_true_connection
    # ...
  end
end

I am wonderfully amazed by the simplicity of the concept and wonder why I it hasn't been done before (although Wicket does something similar). It gives true power to the View as seen as part of an MVC framework. The view tends to clutter with Control stuffs, but Effigy might have a good chance of stopping that.

I had to try it immediatly; and hooray! It works!

(what the docs of Effigy don't mention is that you need to add

  config.gem "effigy"

to you config/environment.rb, but that was quickly figures out)

I wondered how Effigy would work with the Rails Helpers, so I tried the following:

class FooIndexView < Effigy::Rails::View 
  def transform 
    text('h1', @title) 
    attr( 
        'a#menu', 
        :href => ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper.url_for( { :controller => 'foo', :action => 'index' } ) 
    ) 
  end
end

Doesn't work-station. Effigy interferes and somehow ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper does not contain 'url_for' according to ruby. But when I second guess that on script/console like this:

>> ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper.instance_methods.include? "url_for"
=> true

And when I peek in the url_helper.rb it quite clearly states that there is a def url_for(options = {}).

Why this isn't working is beyond me, but I will be looking in to it. When I find something, I'll leave a comment (and if you have the solution, please let me know).

So there is some work to do for jferis and his Effigy; because the loss of the ActionView::Helpers is somewhat unbearable (for me @ least)

Apart from that, getting stuff like observe_field() and such in seems a challenge. Perhaps Effigy should allow the use of ERb as a template (Checked it, doesn't work). This would allow the helpers to work and to have a specialized view mechanism for stuffs that tend to end-up in the controller, because there is also logic that needs be in the view.

I forked Effigy on github and when I find the time I will try to get this plan together

It explains how Oracle has been proven unworthy of OpenSource projects by the way they have treated InnoDB and it also explains that the European Commission (EC) has second thoughts about the deal.

So Monty pleads to send a letter to the EC and ask it to have it force Oracle to

• exclude MySQL from the deal
• be a valid OpenSource stewart

You can find a examplatory petition in the original blog post of Monty. Find it, fill it in and send it to Brussels. In the name of Open Source, free software and great tools; Thank you.

I fixed some stuff (see http://github.com/coffeeaddict/simplic.it/commits/master) and am still amazed with the ease the Rails run.

Obviously I had to divide my attention between the x-term and my kids but I had my improvements in no time. Despite the fact that I had to go and look at the big adventures of Thomas a dozen or so times...

The work I did with git at 2organize has made me even more comfortable with it and I seem to be able to get around with no errors now ;-). My git/tier setup is like this

  [ github ]  <- origin -  [ simplic.it ]  (RAILS_ENV = production)
                             /\      |
                              |     dev
                            origin   |        
                              |      \/
                           [ dev.simplic.it ]

I develop on dev.simplic.it, pull my fixes from dev/master in simplic.it and then push to origin (being github). This ensures I have only production ready code on github (not that it matters for simplic.it) and I like the workflow it gives me.

Still hope to find a workplace where git is the leading SCM because I firmly believe in the power of git over subversion or CVS. Come to think of it, I hope to find a workplace... As my current assignment over at 2organize is due to end along with the present year.

I had a glance over at this lil' comparison when I was looking for a good authentication plugin (I like plugins, they save me code writing) and I gloomed.

All I wanted was something to authenticate a user with. Something that has knowledge of a username and password and can combine the two together so that you can say; "That girl at the other end is Alice after all".

And I wanted a mechanism to do authorization so that I could grant Bob access here and deny that same access to Alice. The granularity of the authorization I needed was 'user' and 'admin'. Blunt, effective and useful :-) I choose to use easy_roles for that. Although I think the serialized array could have been better done, it served my purposes.

But I still had no authentication framework. So I stumbed out my own plugin using the methods of authentication I have used many times before. There is a user, a password and some salt. Mix the password and the salt to have some sort of security in your database and search the user by his username and salted version of the supplied password.If you can find something, the user is authentic (or has stolen the username and password, but then the owner is an ass so I couldn't care less) The salt is added in the config/environment.rb like so:

  EASY_AUTH_SALT = '# the output of rake secret here #'

I wanted the users of the plugin to have control over the model they would choose as their user model. I would call it User, but names like Role or WebUser are not unthinkable so I made the plugin hookup on request. This is done by calling the acts_as_authentic method.

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_authentic
  end

This will do a number of things for the User model.

• It will add 2 accessors, namely 'password_confirm' and 'new_password' so the user can confirm his first and later passwords
• It will add a class method called authenticate which takes the username and a password as its argument and will perform a find for you. Returning the user object or nil
• It will add a class method called hashed_password which you can feed a string which will then be salted and hex'ed and returned

For the integration with easy_roles (and perhaps others) I wanted my Rails apps to have a 'current_user'. But is it always necessary to have a current user? r is it perhaps only necessary in shielded parts of your app? You get to decide by nominating a controller as an authenticator by using 'acts_as_authenticator_for' and specifying the model that is to be the current user.

  class AdminController < ApplicationController
    acts_as_authenticator_for User
  end

All the things you need like: reset password, signup, login & logout are left as an exercise for the developer. You may have needs I don't know about.

The form_authentication_token is composed of Base64 and it kills some Internet Explorer non-Browsers when the Base64 contains '=', '+' or '/' (which happens with Base64 sometimes).

The token is generated using ActiveSupport::SecureRandom. It hands out a method called base64(). And, here is the surprise, it also hands out a method called hex(). Why the core team hasn't changed the base64(32) to hex(32) some odd releases of Rails ago is beyond me.

So there is a plugin (by me) that does it for you: http://github.com/coffeeaddict/one_train_working

Finding a sound name wasn't easy, it took some reading of the almighty wikipedia, but I have found this.

So, I guess now is the time for a tech blog. Rolled my own (as I do with my cigarettes) as I needed less then anything and wanted to do it with Rails (As I love Ruby and like to write code).

You are looking @ it now. Have a peek over on github to see how it is done (The coolest features are, as always, only available to those that are enabled - it does dragging and dropping of tags and such).

I hope to enlighten you with my tech scribbles real soon so I can unload my private WordPress blog.