BrunoMiranda.com

If you find your model specs looking a little unDRY (repetitive) while testing the model validations, you may use a block to DRY your code.

So you can replace this:

it "should validates presence of first_name" do
  @user.should have_error_on(:first_name, :blank)
end

it "should validates presence of last_name" do
  @user.should have_error_on(:last_name, :blank)
end

it "should validates presence of login" do
  @user.should have_error_on(:login, :blank)
end

...

With this:

%w(first_name last_name login email password_hash).each do |attrib|
  it "should validates presence of #{attrib}" do
    @user.should have_error_on(attrib, :blank)
  end
end

Hope that helps!

PS. “have_error_on” is not standard in rSpec, but only a helper method.

Some of you may have participated or heard about last year’s Rails Day 2006. The contest allowed developers to design and implement a web application in a 24 hour period. In exchange for prizes and a bit of community recognition.

Although the contest was partially successful, and many interesting apps came out of it, this year’s Rails Rumble, September 7-8, 2007, organizers decided to do it differently.

Rails Rumble will allow a 48 time period for app development and deployment. The teams will be made up of 1-4 developers and there is currently a max of 50 teams. Applications will be judged by their completeness, user interface, originality, usefulness and overall.

The event includes sponsorships by Pragmatic Bookshelf, Cashboard, Active State so good prizes are expected.

If you are a rails developer, and would like to participate run over to Rails Rumble and sign up.

I was unaware of this until recently so you might find it useful.

You can create a list of all your favorite rails plugins at Agilewebdevelopment.com and use RaPT to install the entire list into a newly created rails app.

To install RaPT:

sudo gem install rapt

Go to agilewebdevelopment.com, login and add plugins to your favorites. The site will provide you with a unique url that you can use to install the pack of plugins.

rapt pack:install http://agilewebdevelopment.com/favorites/
pack/243610d6bf75

Enjoy.