Renum Moved to Github

Chris O'Meara recently contributed a fix to make constantize_attribute handle nil values sanely. (Did you know "".constantize # => Object? I was sure surprised.)

He's using constantize_attribute to persist renum enumeration values in ActiveRecord models, which is the reason I wrote it in the first place. The reminder that these things do get used here and there inspired me to give renum a little late Spring cleaning.

Renum now lives on github and is set up to be gem-packaged with jeweler, which is a lot more elegant than the previous solution (at least in terms of how much extra stuff it puts into source control). Release 1.0.2 is tagged, but it's functionally the same as 1.0.1 (it just lives in a better SCM and has less packaging cruft).

clj-record now has find-by-sql

I don't know why I didn't do this 3 months ago (or 5), but this morning I extracted find-by-sql from find-records so you can do arbitrary queries and still have them run through the callbacks defined for your model.

Specifying Column Order in ActiveRecord Migrations

ActiveRecord migrations don't allow you to control column order when adding or changing columns. You can always just

execute "ALTER TABLE ..." # but it's ugly and hard to remember the details.

If you're willing to give up vendor neutrality, you can have the feature in pretty-Ruby-migration syntax with a small effort. Here's an implementation for MySQL that adds options :first and :after to add_column and change_column.

ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::MysqlAdapter.class_eval do
  def add_column_options!(sql, options)
    super
    if options[:after]
      sql << " AFTER #{quote_column_name(options[:after])}"
    elsif options[:first]
      sql << " FIRST"
    end
  end
end

(It's also available in this gist if you'd like to suggest a cleaner way.)

With that in place,

a.add_column :foos, :bar, :string, :after => :baz

will execute

ALTER TABLE `foos` ADD `bar` varchar(255) AFTER `baz`

and

a.add_column :foos, :bar, :string, :first => true

will execute

ALTER TABLE `foos` ADD `bar` varchar(255) FIRST

Love that Ruby!

Now this is a monkey-patch, but as monkey-patches go it's pretty innocuous. Rather than redefining a method that's already implemented in MysqlAdapter (and as with many monkey-patches copy-pasting the existing implementation so we can modify it), we're defining a new override of a method (albeit undocumented) inherited from the SchemaStatements module (via AbstractAdapter). If you wanted to, you could subclass MysqlAdapter and then configure Rails to use your own adapter, but I suspect that would be more expensive to own than just adding this method to MysqlAdapter. (Beware: there are many useful Rails-provided rake tasks that look at your adapter string to decide whether to be useful or to spit in your face.)