raquelxmoss/today-i-learned

You learn something new every day, apparently

Today I Learned!

Inspired by similar projects by other devs, I'm going to write down a thing that I've learned every day.

February 2016

17th

Today I learned about member routes in Rails. It's an easy way to add routes to resources that might not be your basic RESTful routes. For example:

  resources :submissions, only: [:show] do
    member do
      get :publish
      put :accepted
      put :rejected
      put :submitted_for_publishing
    end
  end

Will produce:

  publish_submission GET /submissions/:id/publish submissions#publishing
  ....

It's much less wordy than writing out things like:

  get '/submissions/:id/publish' to: 'submissions#publish', as: submission_publish

24th

Today I learned that you can delete a remote git branch like so:

  git checkout old_branch
  git branch -m old_branch new_branch

  git push origin :old_branch

  git push origin new_branch

The : in front of the old branch name deletes the remote branch

29th (Leap day!)

Today I learned that, contrary to what Jon told me once, Rails' render: 'partial_name' and render partial: 'partial_name' are NOT the same.

When sending along local variables, it's probably a better idea to use render partial: 'partial_name'

Here's why:

If you are using the term partial: in your render, for example like so:

  = render partial: 'partial_name', locals: {foo: 'x', bar: 'y'}

Then your locals will be available simply as foo and bar, directly:

  = foo
  = bar

The other syntax doesn't quite work like that! You need to access your variables in a different (uglier) way

  render 'partial_name', locals: {foo: 'x', bar: 'y'}

  = locals[:foo]
  = locals[:bar]