Hello everyone! This is Eugene, with a selection of interesting improvements to Rails merged in the past week.
Support for per-environment credentials is coming in Rails 6.0, but adding a new environment wasn’t always easy: if your application accessed credentials during boot, the credentials:edit command would fail to run, which would in turn prevent you from adding the missing credentials. Oops!
When prepared statements are enabled, querying an integer column with an out-of-range value causes an error in the underlying database driver. To work around this issue, Active Record used to refuse to run the query and always return a negative result, e.g. ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound.
This approach worked for simple queries, but gave incorrect results for more complex ones. Out-of-range values are now converted to “impossible” predicates instead (e.g. WHERE 1=0), which allows the query to run without an error while still producing the correct result.
Speaking of large numbers: this pull request, opened 18 months ago, was number 30,000 on the Rails repository. 🎈
Values stored in TIME columns in the database are mapped to Time objects in Ruby. The latter includes date parts, where the former doesn’t; to deal with this discrepancy, a default date of January 1st, 2000 is always assigned.
When a multi-parameter time value—as generated by the time_select helper—was assigned to an attribute, its year would be set to 1970 instead, producing a different result depending on where the value came from.
With this fix, time attributes have fully joined us in the 21st century. 🖖
Date#advanceThis method was copying its options hash unnecessarily. Now that it doesn’t, it’s both faster and allocates less memory.
28 people contributed to Rails since our last issue; you can see the full list of changes here.
Until next week!