Templates with HAML

HAML(XHTML Abstraction Markup Language) is an alternative to RHTML for writing templates for views in a Rails application. Its advantages over RHTML include brevity and clarity.

Features:

• Whitespace active
• Well-formatted markup
• DRY
• Follows CSS conventions
• Integrates Ruby code
• Implements Rails templates with the .haml extension
• it is elegant

how to install:
We can use gem or plugin

1)install gem :
sudo gem install haml
2)install plugin:
ruby script/plugin install git clone git://github.com/nex3/haml.git

Usage:
save files with extension .haml

Let's look at the HAML: index.html.haml

%h1 Hello to you all
%p This is a test page

A '%' symbol creates an HTML tag. 2 spaces are used to indent the code into sub-elements and we need not to specify end tags.so that reducing so many lines code.

I tried to post examples with brief introduction, but the blog site seems to be not supporting html tags.
There is a lot more to learn check these References:

http://haml-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.HAML_REFERENCE.html#plugin
http://haml-lang.com/about.html
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/howtos/templates/haml

Migrating Stored Procedures in RoR

This similar article may be found on the internet, but i guess this article will be helpful for newbie's.

Migrations are a convenient way to alter your database in a structured and organised manner.

Here we are going to see how to create stored procedures with rake db:migrate

First create a new migration file in your db/migrate folder using

ruby script/generate migration stored_procedures. This will create the file db/migrate/001_stored_procedures.

Edit the code to tell it what to do.

The method self.up is used when migrating to a new version, self.down is used to roll back any changes if needed. The class name needs to be the same as the migration name (i.e. db/migrate/001_stored_procedures needs a class name of @StoredProcedures@).

Let us migrate a stored procedure called items with a basic sql code :

The migration file now looks like this :

class StoredProcedures < ActiveRecord::Migration
 def self.up
   execute <<-__EOI
     CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` PROCEDURE `items`(IN l_item INT,IN userid INT,OUT l_itemid INT,OUT l_item_name VARCHAR)
     BEGIN SELECT itemid,item_name,held_by,id INTO l_itemid,userid,id FROM users_items WHERE itemid=l_item AND held_by=userid;
     END
   __EOI
 end
 def self.down
   execute "DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `items`"
 end
end

And now the cool part is just run rake db:migrate, Rails will create all the migration files in your database and also creates Stored procedures.