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Moving a Rails app from 1.2.6 -> 2.0.2

July 5, 2008

Recently I was tasked with upgrading a working Rails 1.2.6 application to version 2.0.2. Here are the majority of issues I found and their fixes/workarounds:


Old reverse_proxy_plugin = broken functional tests:

The units tests were fine, but all the functional tests were broken. Something like this:

post :list, { :site_id => site.id }, { :user_id  => user.id }

would complain like:

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 2)

I found it was the reverse_proxy_fix plugin causing the issue. The Rails 1.x version fails to provide accommodations for functional test helpers in its url_rewriter code. I found there is a new version for Rails 2.x here:

http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2008/03/07/reverse-proxy-fix-1050-released/

script/plugin install http://svn.napcsweb.com/public/reverse_proxy_fix

Make sure and backup your vendor/plugins/reverse_proxy_fix/lib/config.rb file if you have any customizations.


Active Record Store + Oracle CLOB:

This app uses :active_record_store for secure session storage, as defined in environment.rb:

config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store

Using `rake db:sessions:create`, you end up with a database migration like:

def self.up
  create_table :sessions, :force => true do |t|
    t.string :session_id, :null => false
    t.text :data
    t.timestamps
  end
  add_index :sessions, :session_id
  add_index :sessions, :updated_at
end

But that won't work. The 'data' field ends up being an Oracle CLOB type and ActiveRecord won't write session data to it (for whatever reason). I changed the migration to produce a varchar(4000) and that seems to work fine.

t.string :data, :limit => 4000

Plugins:

Many non-common-case features from Rails 1.x were factored out into separate plugins, the 'auto_complete_field' being one of them. I had to add it back using:

script/plugin install auto_complete

You'll want to check this URL for other plugins your app may need after upgrading:

http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/plugins/


Using protect_from_forgery with Javascript helpers:

The new 'protect_from_forgery' feature is on by default in Rails 2.x. It's a welcome addition as it's great for preventing cross-site-scripting attacks on web forms.

But when testing an autocomplete field I found I was getting ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken errors. The code auto_complete_field was rendering didn't contain the required authenticity token:

var form4_surgeon_auto_completer = new Ajax.Autocompleter('form4_surgeon',
'form4_surgeon_auto_complete', '/form4/autocomplete_surgeon', {})

So I just added it myself:

var form4_surgeon_auto_completer = new Ajax.Autocompleter('form4_surgeon',
'form4_surgeon_auto_complete', 
'/form4/autocomplete_surgeon?authenticity_token=<%= form_authenticity_token %>', {})

A patch has been provided for a future Rails version:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10059

But in the meantime it's pretty easy to work around.


Controller Action Names:

This app had a controller action name 'start', as in:

http://localhost:3000/study/start

None of the instance variables existed in the view, and calls to 'debugger' were being ignored. After a while I realized 'start' was probably a reserved keyword in Rails 2.x. I changed the action and view names to 'new_study' and it began to work again.

Strange however, 'start' isn't on the Rails reserved keyword list:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/show/ReservedWords

Tags: rubyonrails, oracle

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