Rails - ActiveRecord created_by and updated_by gem

Often your application will want to track who created and updated your data.
On a previous rails 2 project I used a plugin called userstamp which worked well, but until recently it did not support rails 3+

I didn't find any other gems out there at the time, so I put together the clerk gem,
you can install it as a gem in your rails 3+ applications by adding gem 'clerk' to your Gemfile, see the README on github for details

NOTE: the current version relies on your database tables having columns named created_by_id and updated_by_id and the gem does not support any custom configuration.

• https://github.com/house9/clerk
• http://rubygems.org/gems/clerk 

postgres: random useful things

Run sql statements from the command line, use the -c flag


create a random value


crazy updates using regexp_matches

postgres: terminate all database connections

Using psql from the command line you can terminate all connections to a database

Comes in handy when you want to do things like restore your staging or development database

Resources

• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/reference-client.html 
• http://blog.gahooa.com/2010/11/03/how-to-force-drop-a-postgresql-database-by-killing-off-connection-processes/ 

Git Workflow

This is the current git workflow we are using at work, your mileage may vary:




Resources

• http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/git 
• http://yanpritzker.com/gitbook.html#Keeping+a+topic+branch+in+sync+with+its+parent 
• http://yanpritzker.com/gitbook.html#One+branch+per+bug 
• http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/02/02/push-and-delete-branches.html 
• http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html 
• http://sleeplessgeek.blogspot.com/2011/03/using-git-cherry-pick.html 

Inspect all jQuery events on an element

Very useful

$("SELECTOR").data("events");


All bound event handlers are stored in the elements data context under the events key
This can be very useful when debugging with tools like FireBug

$("form").submit(function () { alert('submit form'); });
$("form").data("events");
> Object { submit=[1] }


Resources

• http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1727-Viewing-jQuery-DOM-Event-Bindings-With-FireBug.htm 

Get table and column information in postgres

Use the information_schema catalog - http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/information-schema.html

Get table and columns from the public schema




This can be useful, maybe you want to auto generate some text that creates foreign keys based on a naming convention - for instance let's say we have a ruby/rails method called make_fk_unless_exists




The 'code' column would render something like

make_fk_unless_exists :projects, :milestone_id, :milestones
make_fk_unless_exists :tasks, :project_id, :projects
...