active-record episodes

This episode finishes up the Rails 2.2 series by showing a few miscellaneous additions that I find useful.

Want to create a Ruby Gem instead of a Rails plugin? In this episode I will walk you through creating a gem to extend Rails.

Have you ever wanted to access helper methods outside of the view layer? In this episode I show you a couple ways to do just that.

Have you ever wanted to fill up a database with a lot of test data? See how to do that in this episode using the populator and faker gems.

You know those invitation systems where a given user can invite a number of other people to join? That's what I show you how to make in this episode.

If you need a full text search engine, Thinking Sphinx is a great solution. See why in this episode.

Rails 2.1 brings some new caching features which makes it very easy to cache any values including models. See how in this episode.

If you want Rails to behave a certain way, try changing it and submitting a patch. This episode will show how to do exactly this using Git.

The scoped method allows you to generate named scopes on the fly. In this episode I show how to use anonymous scopes to improve the conditional logic which was used in the previous episode on advanced search form.

If you need to create an advanced search with a lot of fields, it may not be ideal to use a GET request as I showed in episode 37. In this episode I will show you how to handle this by creating a Search resource.