Latest Free Screencasts (page 29)

This episode will walk you through setting up a Rails project on subversion. It covers some helpful tips and gotchas you may experience along the way.

REST adds many constraints. It restricts your controllers to seven actions. Normally this is okay, but sometimes you need to add your own custom actions. Learn how in this episode.

When you add a custom route, make it a named route so you have url helper methods to easily link to that new route. See episode for details.

Your site may be at risk! When using mass assignment, you are giving the user complete control over that model and its associations. See how a hacker might use this vulnerability and learn how to stop it in this episode.

If you need to display the record count for a has_many association, you can improve performance by caching that number in a column.

It is often asked: how do I create a list of checkboxes for managing a HABTM association? Ask no more because this episode will show you how to do exactly that.

Keep your controllers clean and forms flexible by adding virtual attributes to your model. This very powerful technique allows you to create form fields which may not directly relate to the database.

In this episode, Tom Werner covers some of the basics of the ruby image library ImageScience. ImageScience is a wrapper for the FreeImage graphics library, and is a lightweight alternative to RMagick.

Move a find into the model to clean up the controllers and remove duplication. Also see how you can call these custom find methods through an association.

Learn a quick way to improve performance. Just store the end result of an expensive command in an instance variable!