Right Traq Blog

Rails Subversion External Management with Piston

Sun, 4 Feb 2007 00:25:00 EST

I’ve been mulling over the best way to manage the many plugins I use that have external svn repositories. Luckily Piston makes light work of vendor branch management in rails.

Piston Homepage

Here’s a rundown:


$ gem install --include-dependencies piston

$ cd $your_rails_project_cwd

$ piston convert
Importing 'http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/acts_as_versioned' to vendor/plugins/acts_as_versioned (-r 2691)
Exported r2691 from 'http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/acts_as_versioned' to 'vendor/plugins/acts_as_versioned'

...

$ svn proplist --verbose vendor/plugins/acts_as_versioned/
Properties on 'vendor/plugins/acts_as_versioned':
  piston:root : http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/acts_as_versioned
  piston:local-revision : 19
  piston:uuid : 567b1171-46fb-0310-a4c9-b4bef9110e78
  piston:remote-revision : 2691

Now, when I deploy my app with capistrano or check out a cwd with subversion I’ll grab revision 2691 of acts_as_versioned instead of a newer revision that I haven’t tested with my app.

Ok, great I could have done something similar by hand, but Piston makes handling the large number of plugins very easy to deal with super easy to manage updates.

Problem Solved. Thank you Piston developer François Beausoleil!

Rails Reporting with acts_as_reportable

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:25:00 EST

One of the biggest missing features of Rails has been the lack of a reporting tool. Dynamic reporting is a pain in just about any language, but particularly with Rails because of predefined views and railsish renderings. Views are great when working with predefined sets of data derived from ActiveRecord.

Unfortunately it isn’t easy to dynamically query and render resulting data sets.

Ruport has been around for some time now, but until now hasn’t had a sweet rails plugin to convert ActiveRecord data to ruport data collections.

Along comes acts_as_reportable...

With acts_as_reportable you can do really cool stuff like this:


class Part < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable
  belongs_to :account
  belongs_to :category
end

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable
  has_many :parts
end

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable
  has_many :parts
  has_many :categories, :through => :parts
end

class ReportsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    parts = Part.report_table(:all, :include => [:account, :category])

    # Remove non content columns
    parts.column_names.each{ |c| parts.remove_column(:name => c) if c =~ /(.id|_id|_count)$/ }

    # Convert table headings
    parts.column_names = parts.column_names.collect{ |cn| cn.gsub(/\./, ' ').titleize }

    render :text => parts.as(:html), :layout => true
  end
end

See the results here

The possibilities here are pretty awesome. To make this work really well, we could very easily create a form to add conditions to a find. Combine it with something like the ez_where plugin and you’ve got some pretty powerful reporting functionality.

Happy New Year!!!

Mon, 1 Jan 2007 11:28:00 EST

Welcome to 2007! We’re all excited about big things coming up in the year. This month we are rolling out the TRAQInventory.com beta and we’re working on some other super secret projects to add to our inventory management services.

Merry Christmas To All!

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:34:00 EST

Well, we’re pretty close to Christmas, it’s been a heck of a year for us here at Right Traq. We’re all looking forward to spending some time with our families, and having a few days of down time.

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2007 here we come!

Beta Coming Real-Soon-Now!

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:23:00 EST

After a very long wait, I just want to let everyone know that the beta program will be launching in a week or two. We’ve made major breakthroughs, and we’re just about ready to start the closed beta.

You can imagine how excited we are to launch this program, and we hope all of our testers are just as excited.

For prospective buyers we’re bringing a simple inventory management system with no strings attached. No IT staff needed, no million dollar upfront investment required, never pay for updates, you don’t even have to worry about backups…we do it for you.

More big news coming soon!

Welcome Hadyn

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:25:00 EDT

On Monday Right Traq added a new member to our team. I’d like to welcome Hadyn to our technical staff.

Hadyn will be working on a number of technical projects that we have going on in house. Hadyn’s background is in Information Science and Technology – Systems Development. He’s already jumped into the exciting world of Ruby on Rails. We’re very glad to have him.

Development Update

Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:06:00 EDT

First of all we appreciate all the interest in the beta program! Thanks to everyone who has signed so far or shown interest.

We’re still about four week off, so there is still time to sign up.

Until then bear with us, send us your thoughts on inventory management, what you’re looking for, what are your needs. We’ve pretty much got a handle on what we’re going live with but we’re still interested in your input. We’d also like to know what type of software you’re using already or what software you’d like to integrate with.

If you’ve got input email us

New Ruby Site

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:06:00 EDT

There is a new Ruby Language website!

I’d really have to say I like the new look, and the new home page says it all…


# Ruby knows what you
# mean, even if you
# want to do math on
# an entire Array
cities  = %w[ London
              Oslo
              Paris
              Amsterdam
              Berlin ]
visited = %w[Berlin Oslo]

puts "I still need " +
     "to visit the " +
     "following cities:",
     cities - visited

Welcome Mari

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:58:00 EDT

The past few weeks have been exciting, and we’ve had some new developments. We’d like to welcome the newest member of our team, Mari!

Mari will be working on our marketing projects, and I hope to get her on the blog soon. Mari has a background in marketing and accounting, and she’s already started on a few projects that we’re thrilled about.

Ruby on Rails Inventory Management

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:29:00 EDT

When we founded Right Traq I had tons of experience doing custom PHP Inventory applications. Some of them were plain old function based, and others MVC based. About a year before we got started I had a prototype asset manager that I did in rails-0.12.1. This project was my first go at a rails application and I was astonished. It was relatively easy to develop, and in about 2 weeks I had about the same features as a huge PHP project I worked on for 6 months. Ruby on Rails really made development simple. Most of routine tasks needed for my projects were already taken care of in Rails, and better yet I could easily add features that really separate it from the competition.

TRAQInventory is a Ruby on Rails Inventory Management application.

After 6 months of development TRAQInventory is the result. We like to call it Inventory Management 2.0 because TRAQInventory brings Web 2.0 features that drive social networking, user generated content, and semantic web content to inventory management. Inventory Management 2.0 means your inventory data can actually tell you something, send you messages, integrate with other apps and be more of an information tool than a cumbersome liability that underperforms, and wastes time and money.

So I am pleased to announce that we’re opening the signup for the TRAQInventory Beta program.

Click Beta Signup to sign up for the TRAQInventory beta program.