Using capybara’s standard web steps.rb often times isn’t very dry. For a scenario where a user completes a lengthy form, with text & select fields as well as radio and check buttons, I refactored the code, leading to a much cleaner scenario:

Before:

After:

And here’s the step definition:

Getting Rails 3.1rc4 to run on Heroku’s Celadon Cedar Stack was no easy feat to begin with, mostly because the new asset pipeline is not well documented.

After the rails 3.1 hackfest on July 14, a new release candidate came out. Unfortunately, merely updating rails broke things on Heroku. Here are the steps I took to get it to work with the newest rc5:

Upgrading an existing application from rc4

1. In your gemfile, change

   gem 'rails', '3.1.0.rc4'

   to

   gem 'rails', '3.1.0.rc5'

2. If you were using therubyracer-heroku, get rid of it.
3. Add execjs to your gemfile:

   gem 'execjs'

4. Run bundle update
5. Adjust your application.rb. Change the line that reads

   -Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env) if defined?(Bundler)

   to

   Bundler.require *Rails.groups(:assets) if defined?(Bundler)

6. Edit your production.rb:

   If you have the line

   config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile" # Use 'X-Accel-Redirect' for nginx

   change it to

   config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = nil

7. Important! According to Heroku support, some older apps were having trouble with the javascript runtime, because of an incorrect path variable that is set when the application is created. To get around this, run

   heroku config:add PATH=vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:bin

   and restart the application

   heroku restart

The complete gemfile should look like this:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.1.0.rc5'
gem 'pg'

group :assets do
  gem 'coffee-script'
  gem 'uglifier'
  gem 'sass-rails'
end

# Asset template engines
gem 'json'
gem 'sass'
gem 'jquery-rails'

# heroku
group :production do
  gem 'thin'
  gem 'execjs'
end

If you’re still having issues, post it in the comments or ask the phenomenal Heroku support.

…  knowing where to look. This is not really a secret. The thing is that you won’t get anywhere if you don’t know your way around a system or programming language. Instead of trying to learn everything as you go along, buy a couple of books instead. For example, if you want to learn how to develop web apps with Ruby on Rails, get something on Ruby, Rails, JavaScript (affiliate links), and maybe Relational Databases. Read one book a week. Within a month, you’ll know where to look. And that’s all you need to know.

I sometimes use the Blueprint CSS framework for development. The problem is that if you want to generate a grid using Blueprint or similar frameworks, you have to assign a class of “first” to the first element in each row, and a class of “last” to the last element in each row.

This is a nice way to get the job done. It uses a helper method that returns “first” or “last” based on the index of the array with the elements, and the number of columns that is passed as an argument.

Put this in your helper file
In your view, instead of writing

you write:

Let me know if you have any questions.