Articles tagged “rails-3”

• Rails 3: Action Mailer

  ~ by Jonathan Martin

  As a result of designing this blog, I’ve come to appreciate the refinement of Rails 3, and the drudgery of a few “less than perfect” spots.

  ActionMailer (now powered by the Mail gem instead of TMail) is an incredible refactoring of the traditional Rails 2.x email system; frankly, before Rails 3, the email system was anything but elegant — besides the clunky API, none of the traditional view helpers were available, and multipart emails with attachments were hackish.

  The new system takes a huge step in the right direction by incorporating a sleek API interface and merge of ActionMailer with the traditional ActionController/ActionView. In essence, whereas before the mailer and controller/views were entirely separate entities, ActionMailer now inherits from these classes, and consequently acts much more like a traditional view. This approach hugely simplifies the design process by recognizing the similarity between HTML webpages and HTML email.

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• Rails 3: Auto Require

  ~ by Jonathan Martin

  During the process of coding my blog, I came across the need for a truncation feature (another post in and of itself). So I made a new file under the lib directory called string.rb which added a truncate_html function to the String class. Lo and behold, whenever I called the function, the console printed an error stating that no such function existed.

  In Rails 3, lib files are lazy loaded — this can be adjusted by adding the first line to the config/application.rb file. Restarted the server, but still I received the error.

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