Errata for Agile Web Development with Rails

#31429: undefined method `scaffold' for AdminController:Class

I'm using a newer version of rails, than that used in the book. I'm sure that this is the reason for this technical issue? How does one then rectify this problem? Or is there another reason for this particular problem?--Duvandekoker

#30152: The listing for "depot_q/app/views/login/list_users.rhtml" omits the <div> tags that should enclose the snippet. The "List users" link in Iteration F4's administration sidebar didn't work as advertised until I added the tags like this:

<div class="depot-form">

<h1>Administrators</h1>
...
</ul>

</div>--Don Bessinger

#31677: hello, i think that the logic of Total price in Shopping Cart is wrong. You have it wrong on the picture on same page too:

Total price should be calculated as sum of all products in
the cart (in book you are summing only prices of the cart items)

I think instead of:

def total_price
@items.sum{|item| item.price}
end

it should be...

def total_price
@items.sum{|item| item.price*item.quantity}
end--remo

#31731: The highlight function does not work when adding the first of a product type to the cart. I.E. 'Book A' has no entry in the cart. When I click add to cart, I receive a type error: null value from the rjs. However, as others have posted if I click add to cart again for 'Book A' the highlight effect works and fades the new 2 x Book A line. It appears that some additional logic may be necessary to cover the base case for the first item of a product type.--Matthew King

#29982: The create script needs to remove the constraints prior to drop_table:

class CreatePropagationRecords < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :propagation_records do |t|
t.column :status_id, :integer, :null => false
t.column :plant_id, :integer, :null => false
t.column :quantity_required, :integer, :null => false
end

execute "alter table propagation_records add constraint fk_propagation_records_statuses
foreign key (status_id) references statuses(id)"

execute "alter table propagation_records add constraint fk_propagation_records_plants
foreign key (plant_id) references plants(id)"

end

def self.down

execute "ALTER TABLE propagation_records DROP FOREIGN KEY fk_propagation_records_statuses"

execute "ALTER TABLE propagation_records DROP FOREIGN KEY fk_propagation_records_plants"

drop_table :propagation_records
end
end
--Mark Jones

#31684: Book reads "(In fact, this code still has a potential timing issue—it is still possible for two administrators each to delete the last two users if their timing is right. Fixing this would require more database wizardry than we have space for here.)"

Is this correct? Assuming transactions are atomic, this case should not occur, since the transactions occur atomically and the one that loses the race will always report a user count of zero. However, I don't know whether InnoDB transactions are in fact atomic.--Scott Moonen

#30584: The test will not run correctly because a number of fields in the 'line_items' table are defined to be NOT NULL. Therefore the default fixture file will not work, and the test will return a SQL error when attempting to store the fixture data into the table (due to missing values). (This is on OS X Leopard, using sqlite3 as database, but I presume other DBs will show the same issue.)--Tim

#30259: Running user_stories_test.rb, as supplied gives me:

NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for :put:Symbol

Changing :put to 'put' results in a failure:

Expected response to be a <:success>, but was <404>--Thomas J. Webb

#29670: The footnote states, "simply make it a datetime and name it created_at", but the majority of the book has "timestamp" -- do a search on "created_at". Which is it, or doesn't it matter?--Bil Kleb

#31068: Your finder_sql returns all rails line items (whether or not associated with your order)
I suggest you change to :
:finder_sql => "select l.* from line_items l, products p " +
" where l.product_id = p.id " +
" and p.title like '%rails%' " +
" and l.order_id = #{id} "

Thanks to the authors and rails community.
You really make my coding life happier.
--miguel cabero

#31069: Precision to my previous recommandation : make sure the #{id} is between single quotes, otherwise it will be interpolated to early given a wrong value.

So change to :

:finder_sql => "select l.* from line_items l, products p " +
" where l.product_id = p.id ' +
" and p.title like '%rails%' " +
' and l.order_id = #{id} '

Thanks to the authors and rails community.
You really make my coding life happier.
--miguel cabero

#29794: The documentation for validates_format_of says that it has an ':allow_nil' option, but this doesn't seem to be the case (it isn't mentioned in the online API docs, and doesn't seem to have any effect in rails 1.2.4.--Leo Shaw

#31096: Explanation of the :method parameter to "verify": "The request method (:get, :post, :head, or :delete) must match one of the given symbols." It seems weird that :put has been left out. If it was intentional, it should be documented. But it shouldn't have been intentional, as the relevant code from actionpack-x.x.x/lib/action_controller/verification.rb (around lines 88-89) is

if !prereqs_invalid && options[:method]
prereqs_invalid ||=
[*options[:method]].all? { |v| request.method != v.to_sym }
end

which is rather nonspecific about the actual methods.--Irfan Adilovic

#29865: Minor error in the Time-Based Expiry of Cached Pages section. A sentence reads in part:

the page cache file for content/show/1 will be in
app/public/content/show/1.html

I believe the location should be

public/content/show/1.html--Bill Barnard

#29936: In Rails 1.2.6, I noted the following differences regarding TextHelper functions:

truncate() takes a 4th optionnal argument: truncate_string = "..."

highlight() takes a 3rd optionnal argument: highlighter = '<strong class="highlight">\1</strong>'

excerpt() takes a 4th optionnal argument: excerpt_string = "..."

auto_link(), strip_tags and strip_links() are not documented in your book.

Regards
--Farzad FARID

#30456: Paging is broken if you utilize the search. Results come back fine initially, however when you page next or select a different page (while using the search), the search action is utilized (vs. list) and you lose the admin layout.--Doug Conn

#29756: in the example given for "periodically_call_remote" the third line is a condition where .innerHTML == "Unknown" which will cause this supposedly periodic function to only run once, for once the div is changed from "Unknown" the condition will fail.--ari gold

#29878: At the bottom of the page, the code says, "<%= submit_to_remote 'Send Email', 'send'..." Those parameters are reversed. In fact, on the next page, the example shows '<input name="Send Email" type="button" value="send"'. "Send Email" should be the value, not the name.--Shannon -jj Behrens

#29817: The code presented in this page 'auto_complete_demo.rhtml' does work in Safari, but not in Mozilla based browser like FireFox or Camino. Additionally, the code presented seems unnecessarily complex.

A little investigation seems to indicate that an easier + portable solution is to use a 'text_field_with_auto_complete' macro and pass the tokens delimiter. I have tried this one on Mozilla based browsers and it does work.

BTW: 'text_field_with_auto_complete' is how Autocomplete is presented in the Rails recipes book, or in the scriptaculous demos.--Pietro

#29758: under "auto_complete_field options", in about the 2rd paragraph down, it says something about overriding the default server endpoint. this is in the optional section but in the previous section - "autocompletion" - the server endpoint (the :url option) - is specified. the non-optional section, the :url option should not be specified, at the very least, to show an example of how you can use autocomplete without the :url option.--ari gold

#29879: At the bottom of the page, it says, "as an HTML snippet containing just <li> elements." However, on the next page, the file "progforms/app/views/user/autocomplete_favorite_languages.rhtml" includes the <ul> too.--Shannon -jj Behrens

#31141: The example configuration for smtp server should be:
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { ...

rather than
config.action_mailer.server_settings = { ...

#30476: I found this section quite helpful in deploying my app, however in my case it didn't work using the recipe you gave. In Step Five on page 620 you give the apache config file that we have to put in to connect apache to the mongrel cluster. When I did this exactly as written in the book it seemed to work, however when I went to my webpage I got a 403, permission denied error.

It seemed that for some reason apache couldn't actually connect to the rails app. I'm not quite sure exactly why but adding this:
<Proxy *>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Proxy>
To the top of my virtual host file fixed the problem entirely.

Thought you might want to look into it or put that in the next edition to help all those poor souls out there like me.

Thanks again for the great book.