installing the mysql gem under leopard

I am building a new dev laptop (an MSI Wind u100 running Leopard!) and got everything going... but getting the mysql gem to install was tricky. I had installed MySQL from a binary DMG install.
The trick was to install the gem like so:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Forcing a different render format

I am writing an OAuth system for FilmAmora for the iphone app (and anything else I guess) to use.
I want to always output xml from the controller that is handling the catalog output... but how to do that!

I came up with this:

  def list
    render :template => "/catalogs/list.xml.builder", :content_type => "text/xml"
  end

This will always output xml (with the right mime type) no matter what the requested format was.

Creating a new rails app with an old version

After much hunting I found how to do this

gem list rails

to see what versions you have. I need to create a 2.1.2 rails app. you can do that by issueing this command:

rails _2.1.2_ my_app

cookies and hosts / domains

I have been struggling for weeks with a problem of users being logged in to mysite.com, but not en.mysite.com and es.mysite.com. I posted on Ruby Groups and even tried to hire someone to do the work... but to no avail.
Finally I think I cracked it today.

Two things. First, for some reason doing this didn't work:

  if RAILS_ENV == 'production'
    config.action_controller.session = {
      :session_key => '_my_session',
      :session_domain => '.mysite.com',
      :secret      => 'xxx'
    }
  else
    config.action_controller.session = {
      :session_key => '_my_session',
      :session_domain => '.mysite.local',
     :secret      => 'xxy'
    }
  end

So, I substituted this into each environment file:

config.after_initialize do
  ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain] = '.mysite.local'
end

That got my session's having the correct domain set (.mysite.com) meaning that the session was saved across subdomains.

Cookies

But then I encountered a second problem. Cookies.
After switching to hide and seek / show and tell methods to enable me to page cache even pages that had logged in status all over them (more on this in another post) I needed some user info in a cookie. But my cookies were tied to the subdomain!
I was setting the cookies like this:

      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :cart_items_count => cart_items_count,
        :nothing => 1
      }.to_json

I thought, ok I just need to add the domain in:

      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :cart_items_count => cart_items_count,
        :nothing => 1,
        :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      }.to_json

No...this didn't work. Everything was being chucked into the cookies 'value' and not the domain field (same happened if I added in an expires_at key). What was going on?
Aha! It is the json-izing.

So, I moved that out to a seperate variable:

      value = {:cart_items_count => cart_items_count, :nothing => 1}.to_json
      cookies.delete :login, :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :value => value,
        :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      }

Now my cookies had the proper domain info and the value was still proper json. And now my users are logged in across sub domains!