Colin's Notes

Last time I discussed the FLR format and showed how to use the ‘hflr’ gem to read in FLR format and produce Ruby structs. [Read More]

What it is and How to Make it Go Away Using Ruby [Read More]

A couple of recent developments have prompted a refactoring of the DCP and addition of new features. [Read More]

Design Considerations [Read More]

DCP – Data Conversion Program [Read More]

More than a decade ago a friend gave me a copy of The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing. We had been toying with the idea of writing a novel. A few years later I took some of the ideas we had and applied them during my first nanowrimo. Though the novel soon spiraled out of control (and off script according to the “marshall Plan”,) I felt the structure offered in the book helped me to “win” (writing at least 50,000 words in the month of November.) [Read More]

New posting will soon commence.

When importing data into a database you may want to use your Active Record models to help. Perhaps you want to call your validation rules in your model classes or you just want to put the code in your Rails’ project ‘rake’ tasks. You’d like to use Active Record for the job, but the data outside the database has a lot of records. The problem is that creating each record individually may take too much time. [Read More]

You sometimes want to test business logic, possibly outside of Rails, where you don’t want to bother with fixtures and or connecting to a database.  Structs offer a simple solution when you only want to access and modify data in records and associations and aren’t interested in testing finding or saving the data. [Read More]

Structs come in handy when you’re dealing with data not stored in a database.  For example if you knowyou have a CSV file with columns like [“name”,”address”,”zip”] with customer data: [Read More]