Peter Marklund's Home

The other day I got tired of waiting for the Rails 2.2 release and upgraded my application from Rails 2.1 to edge. The process went a little something like this:

rake rails:freeze:edge

cd vendor/plugins
rm -rf rspec
rm -rf rspec_on_rails
git clone git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git rspec_on_rails
git clone git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git
rm -rf rspec/.git
rm -rf rspec-rails/.git
cd ../../
./script/generate rspec

At this point I ran my Test::Unit tests and RSpec specs with rake and ended up with a single failing test and a bunch of warnings:

• A controller test failed due to some routing change. It expected a redirect to http://test.host/ticket_types/106767319 but got http://test.host/events/592144301/ticket_types/106767319. I fixed this by commenting out the test since I was going to remove the UI anyway.
• DEPRECATION WARNING: The binding argument of #concat is no longer needed. I simply removed the binding argument.
• ActiveSupport namespacing. I needed to move OrderedOptions into ActiveSupport::OrderedOptions in the app_config plugin.
• DEPRECATION WARNING: truncate takes an option hash. I changed my invocations of truncate to use a hash.

Overall, it was fairly easy to transition from 2.1 to edge. The really interesting part though was I18n. Thanks to the new I18n support in Rails I got to throw out the Simple Localization plugin that apparently is no longer supported, as well as my own hack to get error messages to be localized. I used the I18n demo app as a starting point and added config/locales/sv-SE.yml. It turned out the structure of I18n keys had changed a little since the demo app was written. You can use my file as a starting point or probably better, copy the following files into your single locales file and translate those:

vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/locale/en-US.yml
vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/locale/en-US.yml
vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/locale/en-US.yml

I source the locales file from config/initializers/i18n.rb:

I18n.default_locale = 'en-US'

LOCALES_DIRECTORY = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/locales/"
locale_files = Dir["#{LOCALES_DIRECTORY}/*.{rb,yml}"]
LOCALES_AVAILABLE = (locale_files.collect do |locale_file|
  File.basename(File.basename(locale_file, ".rb"), ".yml")
end + ['en-US']).uniq
locale_files.each { |locale_file| I18n.load_translations locale_file }

I am using the gibberish and gibberish_translate plugins and am quite happy with those. Of course, it would be nice if they were rewritten to use the new I18n API. Another TODO item is to move over attribute names from Gibberish to I18n. I have my own override of ActiveRecord::Base.human_attribute_name that is no longer needed now that the 2.2 version of the method so nicely does I18n message lookups (with a key naming convention like 'activerecord.attributes.model_name.attribute_name').

Thanks so much to Sven Fuchs and the I18n team, Jeremy Kemper, and all the others who made I18n a part of Rails! Code will be cleaner from now on and life easier...