Scott Rutherford

I”ve been asked a couple of times how to dynamically setup the columns displayed by the AS plugin dependant on the permissions of the user, so I though a quick post would be a good idea.

Basically its very simple, you simply define a hash of all the columns you potentially wish to display keyed by the column name, so something like:

@@columns_hash[:user] = ScaffoldColumn.new(..)
@@columns_hash[:foo] = ScaffoldColumn.new(:name => 'bar')

Then define a before_filter along the lines of:

before_filter :create_columns, :only => ['table', 'update_table']

I got my first batch of cards from Moo today and they are great. I can’t recommend the site enough. The product is neat – any image you like form your Flickr account on the back of a business (ish) card, the user experience is brilliant, and the result is pretty high quality – all for $25 for 100. Brilliant…..

You can also do Skype cards, get ten for free using the ‘freebie’ code.

So yesterday I went to a Carson Workshop called Designing Elegant CSS Interfaces presented by Cameron Moll at a place called the Energy Clinic on Commerical Street just up the road from me in East London. To be honest I had little to no idea what to expect. I’m not a graphic designer by trade and that was clearly who the course was aimed at.

The course contained 6 hours of material from Cameron based around the following 6 areas:

1. History of Computing UI
2. Choosing an Approach
3. Interface Essentials
4. Managing Complexity
5. CSS Proficiency
6. Finessing Your Skills

So been away, had a great time, come back to over 1,000 spam trackbacks from porn sites on my blog, really really not good. My apologies to anyone who may have had to wade through that offensive crap to read any of the plugin bits and pieces. I have now disabled trackbacks which should stop it. But, of course prevents anyone genuine from using a great feature of blogging.

So I’m off for a long weekend on the infamous EasyCruise boat. We are sailing from Nice (one of my favourite French cities) to Cannes, St Tropez and finally Monacco. All in the short space of 4 days. So, please excuse the lack of response to any comments posted during that time. Normal service will be resumed next week.

Bon weekend tout le monde.

I released a new version of the plugin today that fixes a few outstanding issues and adds 3 new extension points. The main things that have been fixed are:

1. Single table inheritance now works
2. Legacy table names are now supported
3. The table formats properly under IE

The 3 extra extra extension points are

1. do_new
2. do_edit
3. do_delete

I will update the post on extending the plugin to fully cover these new features.

This release tidies up some of the things I thought I’d got right with the last one, doh. However, it turns out I had overlooked the paths for the spell check and the resource manager. Both of these now dynamically configure so that you can place your install anywhere you fancy. Unfortunately there is a single piece of configuration now required, if, and only if your app is hosted away from the root of the server.