explore.Poole!inscribing?confine …

Your insightful explanation of the list view error when designating a specific view based on the table columns - saved my life.

Its people like you that make the net a indespensible tool for everyone.

Please posting on your great work and thanks again.

thank you for writing down your approach to handle Ruby on Rails. I just reached a point with a similar problem and you gave me the right hint.

greetings

mtk

i’m currently doing the same thing with the python web framework turbogears and the java web framework wicket. i can really relate; wicket has so little documentation that i can only hope i’m not reinventing anything like PageableOrderedListViews right now. i have a lot of headaches nowadays but i love the learning experience all the same.

btw, you wrote in your initial code <% bird.genus bird.species %>, which gave you an error. in ruby, parentheses are optional; instead of concatenating the two as you intended, you actually called the method bird.genus with the parameter bird.species. it’s equivalent would be bird.genus( bird.species ) in java. For example, whereas in java the syntax for a method would look like overlay.layout( Point center, Double radius ), the syntax in ruby would look like overlay.layout center, radius.

the default layout of the files, when the scaffolding tool is used, mirrors the actions for that model. for instance, if you have a set of birds, their controller would be called birds_controller, and it would have a model class called birds.

if i want a web page that lists a bunch of birds, i can find the code in the list method of BirdsController, the class of which can be found in app/controllers/birds_controller.rb i would then look for the list.rhtml page in app/views/birds directory. if i want a web page that edits the bird’s info, i can find the code in the edit method of BirdsController, the class of which can be found in app/controllers/birds_controller.rb i would then look for the edit.rhtml page in app/views/birds directory. amy hoy’s cheatsheet can probably explain it better than i can (http://slash7.com/cheats/rails_files_cheatsheet.pdf).

if i were in your shoes and i wanted the default (scaffolded) way of displaying bird info, i would run “script/generate scaffold birds”. i would then go to the created app/controllers/birds_controller.rb file and make sure that its list method has the line @birds = Birds.find_all (or maybe write that list method myself). then i would open the file app/views/birds/list.rhtml and write my display code there, probably something similar to what you wrote.

i find rails restrictions on the placement and naming of files to be real draconian. i find it tolerable because it’s much like java’s package com.foo.bar; java expects the public com.foo.bar.SomeClass to be placed in a file called SomeClass.java under the directory com/foo/bar. at times, ruby on rails philosophy seems like some weird version of some social contract: “give up your naming conventions and method idiosyncracies and rails will make your life easier. do something that isn’t our way and we’ll hand you over to the mafia.”