First off, this controller relies on a user being logged in (but this isn't the controller that actually manages the login process).

The easiest way I found to make sure that I was properly logged in was to temporarily change @controller to the UserController — login — then change back. Like this:

A handy pointer regarding testing instance variables from Jeremy Kemper.

To access an instance variable in the controller that you are testing: simply examine what would have been sent to the view, in the response:

something = @response.template.assigns['something'] 

So far I’ve been leaning pretty heavily on:
Pick Axe – Especially Chapters 27 (Built-in Classes and Modules) & Chapter 28 (Standard Library). Those have been an _incredibly_ useful resource for finding that method that you just know must exist, but what’s the syntax?

Agile Web Development w/ RoR – Especially Chapter 14 & 15 (Active Record) and a little Chapter 19 (Action Mailer).

… and there’s one other, but I’ll save that for the grand finale…

Now that this things working, it’s time to break it. In my very first iteration I created the app with a single db, but in reality – it’s going to span two. Today I needed to figure out exactly how this is done. From what I read, this is something that is quite possible… but just isn’t all that straight forward.

Maybe saying that it “isn’t straight forward” isn’t really fair. What’s really the case is more that: It’s just so bloomin easy to work with a single database that you never actually stop to really learn how you’re using the single database. Instead you just change your _outrageously_ straight forward database.yml file and BAM, you’re running.

I’ve found multiple different solutions out there. Some of them really don’t sound appealing – or don’t really fit my needs. Some seem to be exactly what I want… then didn’t work for me, for one reason or another.

I’m to the point now where it’s working and it’s really quite clean. The only flaw (if it really is one) is that the model class is naming the database that it wants to use. How bad is that?… I really don’t mind it at all to tell the truth. I can certainly see an argument for moving it into the config though – which is possible as well… we’ll see if we take that route or not.

Where did I come across this solution, you might ask? I know the suspense has been killing you regarding my other resource… why, Rails Recipes of course.

Add to my model class:
validates_presence_of :name, :email, :address, :pay_type

Add to my view (rhtml):
<%=error_messages_for(:order)%>

That's it. Now if you don't enter the name (or any other) field in my form, it will stop you from proceeding due to that first line, and display the reason in the second… not bad.

Equally amazing me this afternoon was my response from The Pragmatic Programmers on the hardcopy of my book (which still hasn't arrived). While I did expect them to ship me a new copy without too much hassle (if you've read the book you know that they put a lot of value in a positive customer experience), but I wasn't expecting a response 20 minutes later appologizing for the inconvenience and telling me that arrangements were made to reship the book! Not to mention the fact that it wasn't a form letter – on a Saturday!

I only had an hour to work on things tonight but was able to add the shopping cart to the tutorial application.  Granted I am following along from a canned example and having everything spoon fed, but still: it seems like a pretty large amount of work that was really quite simple.  It's really quite exciting to see how simple things can be when you don't have to jump through 10 hoops to do 1 thing.

Now that I’m back home though: still haven’t found a great resolution.

I’ve found a couple of places that indicate that I could just grant for that user to resolve the issue, but when I try that – I’m getting:

Anyway, after struggling and searching quite a bit I just decided to circumvent the error and just run the statement manually in MySql.

That seems to have worked ok… of course, I’m sure that at some point in the future I’m going to be running into this same issue.  Even just having to retype that statement would be annoying, so hopefully I didn’t make any spelling mistakes.

Rob has also pointed out a little bit easier way for me to find some middle ground… this at least doesn’t make me potentially need to retype that statement:

It certainly has been a longer trip getting to this point than I thought, but I do seem to be on track now.  I do have a working application connected to the database properly.  And really… even with the configuration headaches, I don't know how much longer it took than had I done the same things in Java… had I not run into any config problems: it would have been ridiculously faster.

I’m back on track now though. Having returned that copy to Borders and buying it from the source (like I should have in the first place), I’m immediately up and running with the pdf and the physical copy (hopefully with a binder that actually holds pages together) is on it’s way.

Working through the beginning of the book I did actually have some trouble getting Rails installed. I had an issue with the One Click Install for 1.8.4-15 (stable) so instead of spend much time on it I just uninstalled and replaced it with 1.8.4-14 (final) and it went in clean. WinSQL was no problem to install. Then I came to the point of following the 1 line of instructions that it takes to get Rails up and running with RubyGems… trouble.

A solid half-hour of troubleshooting later I decided to just call Rob. He had me do “gems –version”, this was something that I had already done, but I was really just doing it to make sure that it said _something_ . To him 0.8.3 actually meant something: old. So, how did I download a brand new copy of the old version? Well, I’m just _that_ good! Anyway, digging into the directory structure a bit (ruby/lib/ruby/gem­s/1.8/gem/) I noticed that I had a directory called “rubygems-update-0.8.11″. It contained something that (promisingly) was titled “setup” which I ran and … drumroll please … brought me up to 0.8.11. Suddenly the “gem install rails –include-dependencies” ran and all is right with the world.

Now that I’m up and running I’ve gone up through Chapter 4. Basically this means that I have now actually done the simple hello world application that I’ve seen done several times in various presentations. In all seriousness though, it is very good that I’ve actually gone through it myself instead of just seeing it done for the nth time… it certainly did make it easy to pick up though _grin_.

Well, I actually did make it as far as I had hoped and I feel like I’m right on schedule. It was also important that I get the whole environment setup so that I can get some work done on the plane to Vegas. I can guarantee that nothing will get done while I’m out there – and let’s be honest: saying something will get done on the flight home is probably not the most realistic statement either, but… at least I’m up and rolling!