James on Software - Latest Comments in Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Steven Luscher — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:51:00 -0000

@nate – About your uninitialized constant problem… find active_presenter/lib/tasks/gem.rake and add this to the top:

require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../active_presenter')

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Samiha — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:03:00 -0000

Hey,
James I found some problems when I used this gem with select_tags and names of models are like this

presents :photographer,
:user,
:location,
:photographer_award,
:photographers_language,
:photographer_nationality,
:photographer_reference,
:visa

so when I want to put <%= f.select :photographer_language_language_id, [[l(:select_one), nil]] + @languages.collect{|language| [l(:spoken_language, language.name.to_sym), language.id]}, :id => nil %>

and photographer_language_language_id is to catch language_id field from photographer_languages table

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Pat Osterday — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:47:00 -0000

Ok, sorry again... I guess there's some issues with the different versions of the gems/plugins I'm using. I switched to the version with Spree and now it's working. Thanks!

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Pat Osterday — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:48:00 -0000

Ok, I figured out some of my problems with ActivePresenter and ResourceController and it's working now except for "error_messages_for :payment_presenter". I always get "can't convert Array into String" errors. Not sure if you still check out these comments James, but any help would be appreciated.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Pat Osterday — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:54:00 -0000

I'd love to see a full example of this working with ResourceController. The Spree code doesn't really make full use of ActivePresenter and I didn't think the Blank app did either. I tried for hours to get it to work and gave up.

If I have a User model with an Address as Addressable, how would this work? I tried doing a UserPresenter using the UserController directly, then a ProfilePresenter using a seperate ProfileController and nothing would work.

In particular an edit example would be great. Or maybe I just missed something!

Anyway... great work!

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

zdennis — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:30:00 -0000

ActivePresenter seems to be doing two things: handling presentation logic for one or more models, and also handling save/update logic for more than one model. It's meddling in two distinct and completely separate responsibilities. This seems to encourages bad practice when it comes to dealing with either presentation logic and/or multiple model forms. Presenters should only be handling presentation logic. The save/update logic should be done in the model, or if it can't be done there in a domain Service/Manager object.

CachingPresenter is a strict presentation-logic presenter. It does cool stuff with caching/memoization. Should it provide useful to James or anyone else seeing this post please check it out:

* Github - http://github.com/zdennis/c...

* Docs - http://github.com/zdennis/c...

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

James Golick — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:22:00 -0000

@Max - Sure. If there's a need for one, I can definitely add it. Could you not put that validation in one of the models, though?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Max — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:24:00 -0000

Hi, I've been using it and works really nice. Any plans to include a before_validation callback?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Mark A. Richman — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:53:00 -0000

@Nate, have you tried something like this:

:url => { :controller => 'accounts', :action => :create }

I haven't tried active_presenter yet, but it does seem intriguing.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Nate — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:45:00 -0000

Awesome stuff. I do have a question though. After installing the plugin and then trying to run rake routes I get an error: uninitialized constant ActivePresenter.

I installed from Github as a plugin. Also, when using the presenter to create a user and an account I'm getting some weird posting issues.

so my AccountSignupPresenter presents :account, :user

then on my form I have this: form_for @account_signup_presenter, :url => accounts_path

for some reason everything looks great and works, but the form is posting to the accounts index action. It obviously should post to the accounts create action.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks again for the great work!

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Rob — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:53:00 -0000

This looks great for multiple unrelated models or two models with a belongs_to relationship, but doesn't handle has_many scenarios, correct?

<rant>
Why are multi-model forms so fraking hard (no standard solution, gotta write extra code, little documentation on the solutions that exists) in Rails when WebObjects was doing this 10 years ago with keypaths?
</rant>

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Michail — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:22:00 -0000

Thanks! It looks good. But what if there are equal attribute names? Like User.name and Account.name. What form will be in this case?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Geoff Garside — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:19:00 -0000

This looks much nicer than the presenter plugin I slapped together, thanks.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

James Golick — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:24:00 -0000

@John - No idea. I can run it ok. You're trying to download it from rubyforge?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

John Corrigan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:30:00 -0000

Hiya, I can't seem to grab this gem. I'm getting not found errors when I run the gem install command. Thoughts?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Swami Atma — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:55:00 -0000

Hi James,

Nice article.

We met in Berlin last year. I need to send you an email. Can you email me to the address included in this form?

Thanks.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

James Golick — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:19:00 -0000

@Mathijs: It doesn't yet, but we're hoping to have that functionality going soon.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Mathijs Kwik — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:05:00 -0000

Will this gem also handle cases where I want to create/edit a single model with some 'child' models?

So one project with (to leave javascript out of the equation) 10 tasks in a single form for creating and updating the tasks?
What about deleting them?

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Daniel Haran — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:17:00 -0000

@Eric Anderson: If you can avoid multi-object creation, then more power to you. This is indeed only for rare cases - although I think you confuse things by calling it a mixin. Check out the link macournoyer to get a better sense of what this encapsulates.

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Mike Subelsky — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:57:00 -0000

hey James, great work!

I led a BOF session at Railsconf 2008 on this topic, and there's definitely a big interest and need for this gem. In fact I registered "active_presenter" on RubyForge, but never got around to doing anything with it, so if you want to publish this gem there, I'd be glad to transfer the project to you. Just hit me up with an email at mike /-at-/ subelsky.com.

-Mike

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

macournoyer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:23:00 -0000

awesome work James & Daniel!

@Eric, this is an implementation of the Presenter design pattern: http://blog.jayfields.com/2...

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Piotr Usewicz — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:01:00 -0000

This is simply brilliant!

Re: Introducing ActivePresenter: The presenter library you already know.

Lucas Hungaro — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:28:00 -0000

Wow! Very nice. Congratulations once more!