After updating to the latest edge Rails via SVN today, my local development webserver suddenly started to respond with a 500 application error for every request. The mongrel console revealed:

NoMethodError (undefined method `file_exists?’ for #<ActionView::Base:0x2aaaac3eee10>):
/usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/gettext-1.90.0/lib/gettext/rails.rb:280:in `render_file’
/usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/gettext-1.90.0/lib/gettext/rails.rb:278:in `each’
/usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/gettext-1.90.0/lib/gettext/rails.rb:278:in `render_file’
/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb:1107:in `render_for_file’
/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb:841:in `render_with_no_layout’
:
:

Digging deeper, I found out that the method ActionView::Base#file_exists? has been moved to a different place in Rails’ Changeset 8683. Fortunately, fixing it is easy.

Did you ever want to create multiple models in one action? E.g. if your user model has many email addresses, create a user record and his first email address when he signs up… Nick of Pivotal Blabs wrote a nice article about it – but it almost drove me to despair this morning when I was trying to break it down to my user and email addresses model.

This morning I faced a strange problem when trying to write RSpec tests for a user login action. Trying to setting the flash before doing a request, resulted in an unexpected Exception:

TypeError in ‘SessionController logging in with correct credentials should redirect to the url_after_login url if given’
can’t convert String into Integer
…/vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails/lib/spec/rails/dsl/behaviour/functional.rb:80:in `flash’
./spec/controllers/session_controller_spec.rb:52:
./script/spec:4:

A minor bug in TMail (which is used in Rails’ ActionMailer) got fixed finally.

About 2 years ago, I reported bug #6015 to the Ruby on Rails bug tracker. TMail’s create_forward method always returned the first body part of a newly created forwarded mail instead of the forwarded mail itself. Therefore the create_forward method was practically useless. At that time, the ActionMailer and/or TMail developers didn’t seem to be very active. Well… nobody cared about this for about two years.

After I heard that TMail got a new maintainer, I gave it another try and submitted bug #15445 to the newly created TMail bug tracker. Mikel (who is the new TMail maintainer) applied and tested a fix, so the upcoming TMail version will come without this bug. Thanks a lot, Mikel.

Let’s hope this fix will make it into Rails 2.0 so that I can dump one more workaround in my application soon.