create vs. create! vs. new in Rails

I've been spending a little time lately on updating The Secret App to remove cruft (Login / User Engine being the two main sources of said cruft).  Now that I'm no longer locked into an old revision of edge, I have noticed that Rails's ActiveRecord behavior seems to have changed a bit.  Before, I could get away with saying
@widget = current_user.widgets.create!(params[:widget])
Now, that gets me a big fat nil in @widget.user_id.  Unfortunately,
@widget = current_user.widgets.new(params[:widget])
gives me the same darned thing.  The only way I could get the user_id to  fill properly was with
@widget = current_user.widgets.create(params[:widget])
Maybe it's something I am doing wrong, but I haven't found it yet.  I wouldn't put much effort into it, but I really like the clean syntax I get from #create! and so it has gotten under my skin.  Any ideas?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Good reference for RESTful Rails

I love a good cheat sheet; anything to condense a big ol' reference site into a page or so that I can flip to when I need it. However, no one has made a good cheat sheet (or even a good reference, period) for the new RESTful Rails stuff. The best one-post reference I've found is simply_restful in Rails Core on David Goodlad's blog. Plenty of bloggers rah-rahed about simply_restful and gave a few examples of how to set it up, but David includes something unique: a table of all the auto-generated named routes and how to use them. I swear, I must have spent half an hour looking for exactly that information. Ah, sweet spoonfeeding! Thanks again to Mr. Goodlad for putting that out there.

A small change to Rails routing

A recent change in the way Rails deals with incoming requests caught me a bit off guard. I was used to being all loosey-goosey with my routes, like saying

/categories/show/34-Detachable-Widgets.html

and having Rails happyily translate that into a request for /categories/show/34. However, when I caught up to edge a few days ago, my tests started failing. Wah? Further investigation revealed that the culprit was that flagrant .html hanging there on the end (why? because I can). After a bit of digging on the Rails mailing list, I finally found my buried treasure: a post by Jeremy Kemper mentioning that Rails now considers . a "URL separator." Ergo, your route

:controller/:action/:id

becomes

:controller/:action/:id.:format

and all's right with the world again. This allows us to force a format just by using it as the extension (i.e. trigger a specific response via responds_to), so I don't mind the change. I just wish someone had mentioned it a bit more loudly... like I'm doing now.

Tags: ruby, rails