Finding files in vim

Some of my vim-challenged colleagues, when they try switching to vim, miss the Cmd-T function that lets them type parts of a filename and open the corresponding file.

After a quick search of the tips on vim.org, it turns out that someone has implemented exactly this function;

http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=1432

This has the drawback that it will find blah.rb.svn-base when you look for blah.rb. So, I've tweaked it a little to skip any svn files, and also not to look in the 'vendor' directory, so it doesn't find rails source files.

http://gist.github.com/1625

Have fun

Automatically "git rm" all deleted files

Love git. Hate having to "git rm" individual files whenever I delete a bunch of stuff (yes, I know I can "git rm foo/*", but what if I didn't remove *all* the files in foo/ ?).

So, a quick ruby script: gitrmall.rb

Disabling tests in Shoulda

I'm using Shoulda on a client project, although I prefer rspec myself.

One of the things I miss from rspec is the ability to turn off a test, temporarily, by changing;


it "should do something"


...to;


xit "should do something"


Tests which are disabled in this way show up as "Example disabled: it should do something", when the specs are executed.

Using this with autotest and a couple of quick vim macros, my workflow goes something like this;

1. See that there is a failure in a particular test
2. Position the cursor in that test and hit ",ofs" this triggers my macro to disable all specs except the current one, and save the file so that autotest runs it again.
3. Hack, hack, hack to fix the bug, or develop the feature that the failing test relates to.
4. Hit ",ons" to turn all the specs back on and save the file again.

In Shoulda, renaming a test from;


should "do something"


...to;


xshould "do something"


Gives you a nice NoMethodError.

But, this is ruby, so we just add this to our test/test_helper.rb




class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  def self.xshould(name, &block)
    puts "disabled test: #{name}"
  end
end




Now, we get pretty much the same behaviour as with 'xit' in rspec.

For any vim users in the audience, here are the macros (actually, abbreviations) I use to turn tests, specs and shouldas on and off. Just add to your .gvimrc (or .vimrc) file;


"rspec
map ,ofs :%s/ it / xit ''?xitx:w
map ,ons :%s/ xit / it /'':w

"shoulda
map ,ofh :%s/ should / xshould ''?xshouldx:w
map ,onh :%s/ xshould / should /'':w

"test/unit
map ,oft :%s/def test/def xtest''?xtestx:w
map ,ont :%s/def xtest/def test/'':w


ActiveRecord commit timing

I'm building an application where we're using a message queue.

New objects add their IDs to a beanstalkd queue via an after_create callback. Some daemons monitor beanstalk, and grab objects to process, as soon as they hit the queue.

We were getting errors from the daemons, saying "record with ID 'N' not found", but when we looked for object N via script/console, or the database, there it was.

It turns out that the after_create callback (along with all the other object creation callbacks) occurs *inside* a transaction. So, this is what was happening;



There are a couple of ways around this;

Call "self.class.connection.commit_db_transaction" in the model, after the after_create method. This works, but it smells really bad.

A nicer way is to add an "after_commit" callback, like this

Pat Allan has some modifications to this, to make it play nicer with Rails 2.0 and 2.1

Or, there is a version here which handles nested transactions.

Many thanks to Pat for showing me the after_commit stuff.