So you’re in active development and want some real-ish data in your app, eh?  And you keep making adjustments to your model as you understand the requirements better?  Oh?  Your models are deeply nested, like a proper associative-normalizing ninja?  

So I was struggling mightily with this, and couldn’t find any tutorials that gave me the key.  Here were my (non operational) models (simplified for this post):

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation
  has_many :surveys
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :surveys
end

and

class Survey < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  attr_accessible :name, :active
end

So now you want to see these with a sample user + survey? Should be easy right,

accepts_nested_attributes_for

is set! I expected this would work:

params = { :u => {
  :email => "me@awesome.com", :password => "guessthishackers", :surveys_attributes => [
          { :name => 'Test Survey', :active => true}
        ]
        }}
person = User.create(params[:u])

No dice. Fails with a “can’t mass-assign error” in the development log. A great deal of searching didn’t provide an obvious answer, but points clearly to the model. After a fair amount of googling and head scratching, the answer hit me like a brick:

attr_accessible :surveys_attributes

Duh, the attributes hash is a first-level attribute of User, in-and-of-itself!

Moral of the story — seeds.rb is a ruby file that mass-assigns for breakfast. Tweak your models accordingly.

So I’m building a B2B dashboard in Flex, and thought I’d write up a quick post on a problem I didn’t see many online solutions for – well, there are solutions, but they all reference weaksauce flex 2, so I thought I’d go all new and shiny and post this working flex 4 example.

The problem is simple: How do I detect an Idle user, turn off all timed network requests, and — eventually — log off users silly enough to walk away from my interface?

Example: situation this code is meant to save my application from.

So Here’s a somewhat disjointed code sample. This isn’t a working application, and is missing a few helper functions, and, uh, any interactivity whatsoever – but should get anyone where they need to go.

Tada:

Also, thanks to Razorlight for some WordPress assistance getting this page to appear correctly.