Ruby on Rails does a great job of parsing arrays in form data and populating a params hash, for quick and easy access in your controllers. For instance Gives you params[:item] # => ["item 1", "item 2"] Flask doesn't do this work f...

Stateless components are nice. They are simple to use and understand but can become tricky when you start thinking about data and how to manage state. In general, the consensus seems to be that if your UI is going to need state, then at least the componen...

Here is a code snippet that demonstrates how to set up a __ManyToMany through__ relationship in Django. In Rails, the equivalent would be called a __has_many through__ association. If you set the __through__ argument on the ManyToManyField, Django wil...

When running raw SQL queries in Django you must include a primary key otherwise an invalid query exception is raised. Normally this is fine but when running more complex queries a primary key may not be available or even make sense. There is a simple ...

Forms can easily get cluttered when you're dealing with a lot of form fields... er, ERB tags. I've written about extending Rails form builders, which certainly goes along way to shrinking your views where forms are used. The plugin Formtastic is even bett...

Extending forms in Rails is simple and will greatly reduce the amount of code in your views. This example is taken right from the Agile Web Development book on Rails(2.1.*) with one minor tweak. I want to pass a label argument along with the field name so...

You might use the attr_accessible method to create getters and setters for a class that has attributes which don't map directly to corresponding fields in a database. For example let's take the scenario where you are processing a credit card transaction. ...

To make child attributes accessible to your model through a nested forms (Rails 2.3) you'll need to add the "#{child_class}_attributes" to the attr_accessible method in your parent class. If you don't use attr_accessible in your parent model (you would do...

Just for reference... class Member < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :member_profile accepts_nested_attributes_for :member_profile end ...

If you use a consistent date format often in your Rails applciation, it is worth it to add the format to your application environment. You can do this by adding  it to the bottom of the config/environment.rb file. Time::DATE_FORMATS[:my_custom_format] ...

Prototype has a powerful API for accessing and manipulating the Document Object Model, A.K.A the DOM. The following code will let you interact with a simple web form. Suppose we have a form that contains hidden/or locked inputs and they need to be update...