How to search from Flex 3 (NEWBIE)

Rails
#1

Hi, first of all let me say that I’m a Flex developer just getting
into the awesome world of Ruby on Rails, so I consider myself a newbie
on RoR. what I need to do is to search for a specific row on the table
and return the complete row in xml format, the thing is that I need to
search by description rather than by id, so I did this:

class LoginController < ApplicationController

GET /login

GET /login/usuario.xml

def search
t = params[:usuario]
@usuario = Usuario.first(:conditions => [“usuario = ?”, “t”])

respond_to do |format|
  format.xml  { render :xml => @usuario }
end

end
end

but I don’t know what U.R.L. to specify on the HTTPService tag on
flex. I don’t even know how to test if this def search is working from
a browser, can anyone please help me on this one, I’m desperate, I
have a deadline to meet and I’m stuck, please please please help, ANY
HELP will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

#2

Hi c0y0tex,

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 10:37 -0700, c0y0tex wrote:

t = params[:usuario]
@usuario = Usuario.first(:conditions => ["usuario = ?", "t"])

You’re missing the find method so unless your Usuario class has defined
a ‘first’ method the code above should be throwing an error. Isn’t it?

Try…
@usuario = Usuario.find(:first, :conditions => [“usuario = ?”, “t”])

respond_to do |format|
  format.xml  { render :xml => @usuario }
end

end
end

but I don’t know what U.R.L. to specify on the HTTPService tag on
flex.

I know nothing about flex, but if you’re just trying to call this
method the url would be, assuming development mode,

http://localhost:3000/login/search

I don’t even know how to test if this def search is working from
a browser

First thing to do is find out if it’s working at all, then tackle the
various delivery agents.

Easiest thing to do is throw a ‘puts’ in after the find…

puts “@usuario = #{@usuario.inspect}”

will display the value in your console window.

Entering the url above in your browser will display the xml content.

, can anyone please help me on this one, I’m desperate, I
have a deadline to meet and I’m stuck, please please please help, ANY
HELP will be appreciated.

HTH,
Bill

#3

On Aug 14, 1:59 pm, bill walton [email protected] wrote:

GET /login

GET /login/usuario.xml

def search
t = params[:usuario]
@usuario = Usuario.first(:conditions => [“usuario = ?”, “t”])

Are seems like you want

@usuario = Usuario.first(:conditions => [“usuario = ?”, t])

instead (though for simple where clauses based on equality, I prefer
the hash notation. not really important though)

You’re missing the find method so unless your Usuario class has defined
a ‘first’ method the code above should be throwing an error. Isn’t it?

ActiveRecord::Base#first and #all have been convenience methods for
awhile now

First thing to do is find out if it’s working at all, then tackle the
various delivery agents.

Easiest thing to do is throw a ‘puts’ in after the find…

puts “@usuario = #removed_email_address@domain.invalid}”

will display the value in your console window.

Bad idea, this only works if your running your development server
via ./script/server non-daemonized (i think?) in a terminal window
thats still open. For hacky quick&dirty variable inspection i like
doing

raise expression.inspect

though really you’ll just be having calls to Rails.logger.debug all
over the place (and of course tail’ing the output of development.log).

but I don’t know what U.R.L. to specify on the HTTPService tag on
flex. I don’t even know how to test if this def search is working from
a browser, can anyone please help me on this one

well, neither do i. how are your routes set up? definitely worth
reading http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html to get an
understanding of this if you don’t have any other resources available
(although if you haven’t modified your routes.rb (which you did if
the controller was generated via scaffold) :controller/:action.:format
is the default…)

#4

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 11:41 -0700, pharrington wrote:

On Aug 14, 1:59 pm, bill walton [email protected] wrote:

You’re missing the find method so unless your Usuario class has defined
a ‘first’ method the code above should be throwing an error. Isn’t it?

ActiveRecord::Base#first and #all have been convenience methods for
awhile now

I’d missed that. Thanks.

via ./script/server non-daemonized (i think?) in a terminal window
thats still open. For hacky quick&dirty variable inspection i like
doing
raise expression.inspect

You ‘like’ doing quick and dirty differently that I. Doesn’t make
either a ‘bad idea’. I characterized by suggestion as ‘easiest’, and I
think that measure would hold.

Best regards,
Bill

#5

You ‘like’ doing quick and dirty differently that I. Doesn’t make
either a ‘bad idea’. I characterized by suggestion as ‘easiest’, and I
think that measure would hold.

Guess I’m just being anal at this point, but I spose even “easy” is
relative. I run Passenger on my development machine, so apparently
STDOUT goes to the apache error log, which 1) is hardly an obvious
place to look for debugging messages once your app actually runs at
all and 2) I need to become root to view it… hardly convenient.
raise is nice because no matter how you’re looking at your app (rails
console, web browser, test suite), the information you’re asking for
is always smacked right in your face. There’s also no way to forget to
remove a raise statement put in for debugging purposes… its pretty
aggressive like that in reminding you of the right way to do things.

#6

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 12:57 -0700, pharrington wrote:

You ‘like’ doing quick and dirty differently that I. Doesn’t make
either a ‘bad idea’. I characterized by suggestion as ‘easiest’, and I
think that measure would hold.

Guess I’m just being anal at this point, but I spose even “easy” is
relative.

Exactly.

I run Passenger on my development machine,

If I were running Passenger in development, or as you seemed to
understand in your earlier post, ‘unless …’ I use mongrel running in
an open console window without -d, which I do. If I were using
Passenger, I’m sure I’d prefer your approach. I don’t recall the OP
stating one way or another. So I should have started my response to
them with ‘depending on what web server you’re running…’ My bad.

Best regards,
Bill

#7

Thanks a LOT for your help guys, the link pharrington provided was
very very helpful, I managed to do my search, but after I founded
something called RestfulX which is totally awesome, any Flex developer
interested in using Ruby on Rails as a data provider web service
should definitely check it out, it builds the migrations and
controllers on ruby and the views in Flex, also you can define a
single file for the scaffolding information (table definitions and
relations). In top of all it integrates a data handling framework into
Flex, with this framework you can do filters, deletes, updates and all
the things you might need for your RIA.

checkit out http://restfulx.github.com/.

Once again thanks for the help, see you around.

Viktor Amilkar Erickson Reyna López