One of the most convenient features of Rails is the ability to track attribute changes. Rails 7 is releasing soon and bringing in a lot of new features as a treat for developers. One of the many features that Rails 7 is introducing, is that we can also track the associated object. This Rails ActiveRecord specific PR has added two methods for tracking the changes for the belongs_to association. In this article, we will discuss these two new methods with the help of examples. 1. association_changed?The association_changed? method tells if a different associated object has been

We had previously talked about the Serialization formats and How Serialization is implemented for storing objects in the relational database in the first two parts of the blog series. This article focuses on the various Serializers that prepare and construct API transferable data in Ruby on Rails.

Recently we had a requirement where emails were to be delivered to a specific group of users by switching the provider at run time. In short, we are required to deliver the emails by dynamically selecting a provider and not just through a pre-configured provider. Rails provide these Dynamic Delivery Options to override the SMTP settings per mail. But, if you have an existing application with various mailers, applying delivery_method_options will require updating individual mailer action. In this blog, we'll go through the approaches that will work without modifying any existing mailer actions. Setup Assuming that your default

The web is a weird place. You go to sleep thinking that you have a perfectly functional web application and the next day when you wake up, you might find yourself staring at a sudden huge spike in the number of requests. Either your app got popular overnight or you were just a victim of a DOS attack trying to bring your app server down. Usually, it's the latter. There are some popular gems like rack-attack and rack-throttle which work quite well and provides a lot of flexibility. But if you're looking to write your custom logic with minimum dependencies,

Rails framework allows complex objects to be stored in a DB column via the ActiveRecord::Serialization module. This article explains when and how to do it

Data Encryption has never been so important to modern-day applications as it is today. Storing personal data in plain-text format makes the application open to data theft. Not only users' personal data is at risk, but even the application becomes subject to scrutiny when it falls under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) norms. In this blog post, we will explore a quick way to encrypt & decrypt model attributes using Rails handy ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor class to ensure compliance such as GDPR. Let's start with some basics on PII and GDPR mandates. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) examples as per GDPR PII

Race conditions are always surprising, which can occur in production and are difficult to reproduce. They can cause duplication of records in the database. Most of the time the locking mechanism is taken care of by the Rails framework. Users don't have to manage it; especially optimistic locking using the lock_version column. In case of transactions and race around conditions, we can prevent these issues with Pessimistic Locking in ActiveRecord. It locks a record immediately as soon as the lock is requested(uses database row-level locking). Race conditions happen when two users read and update a record at the

Dead code is code that is never executed. It can be a commented out block of code, a method that's no longer called, or an unreachable return statement. It often reflects functionality that no longer exists. Dead code has absolutely no upside and it costs us money, time, and maintenance headaches. It's possible to identify the unused block of code in smaller projects. But in larger projects, it is not as straightforward. It is a delicate process and requires absolute surety of the deadness status to avoid any unexpected breakdowns. A few tools are present that can aid us in

It was the day we were moving. I was observing how the "Packers and Movers" professionals packed our furniture. For example, the King size bed shown below had to be accommodated within a space of about 6-7 inches inside a van. While I kept wondering how they'd manage this, they dismantled the bed. And in went the camel through the needle's eye very neatly. That's when I realized the computing world is not very different from the real world. They dismantled the bed for transportation and then reassembled at the destination. Similarly, in the computing world, we deconstruct objects or

When we are about to test a dynamic API request via Postman and realize that we need to pass a freshly generated signature in the headers, what do we generally do? For each request, we generate the signature using server-side code and copy-paste it in the headers. Sounds like a tedious job, doesn’t it? We faced a similar situation in our application where we had to pass a signature in the headers while testing an API. The signature was generated by encoding all the request parameters using the user's secret key. If any of the request parameters changed, we