Upgrading to Rails 2.1 / 2.1.1 : issues and juicy tidbits.

Hey kids,

Three quick tidbits for those on the internets that are dealing with upgrading to rails 2.1 / 2.1.1.

ActionController::Base#render

If you’ve overridden the ActionController::Base#render method, you might run into issues with a RenderError or ArgumentError, with an error message like “You called render with invalid options.” That would be because the function signature has changed — see here, for example.

The call changed from:

def render(options=nil, deprecated_status=nil, &block)

to:

def render(options = nil, extra_options = {}, &block)

and the function now raises an exception if extra_options isn’t a Hash.

ExceptionNotifier plugin

The ExceptionNotifier plugin accesses @controller.filter_parameters, which is now protected under Rails 2.1. about the subject — the gist is that you need to use the send method — but if you’re running the same version of the Notifier as I am, you might need to change @controller.filter_parameters in two places: filter_sensitive_post_data_parameters and filter_sensitive_post_data_from_env. The calls will look something like:

@controller.send(:filter_parameters, arg1, arg2...)

Of course, because the plugin is broken, you won’t get any emails notifying you of its brokenness (or any other exceptions on your site, for that matter). Fun times.

method_defined? asks not what you think it does

So. Module.method_defined? doesn’t do what you might think it does. You might think it compares its argument to all methods on the module/class. You’d be wrong — private methods aren’t included. There’s a separate function, private_method_defined?, which has what you’re looking for. So if you want to test all methods — public, protected, and private — you’d write something like:

self.method_defined?(str) || self.private_method_defined?(str)

I understand there is some reasoning behind this — but to me, as a still-somewhat-novice rubyist, it violates the principle of least surprise.

That’s all for now. Hope this helps someone out there on the interwebs.

Purchase Relafen