DEV Community: Raghu Betina

TIL: ERB verbatim tag

Raghu Betina — Sat, 17 May 2025 15:37:23 +0000

TIL about the new-ish "verbatim" ERB tag: <%==

https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_support_core_extensions.html#safe-strings

<%= raw something %>

is equivalent to:

<%== something %>

TIL: Hash value omission in Ruby 3

Raghu Betina — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 21:08:04 +0000

Today I learned that as of Ruby 3, we can omit values from hashes if the key name matches the expression:

# In Rubies < v3:
a = "alice"
b = "bob"

h = {a: a, b: b}

# In Rubies >= v3:
a = "alice"
b = "bob"

h = {a:, b:}

Rails partials can have their own layouts

Raghu Betina — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:07:32 +0000

TIL that Rails partials can have their own layouts:

https://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/PartialRenderer.html#class-ActionView::PartialRenderer-label-Rendering+partials+with+layouts

Building a multi-step form in Rails with Wicked

Raghu Betina — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 17:10:31 +0000

I wanted to make a wizard to help students visualize the relationships between their database tables, so I had a chance to play with the Wicked gem. Here is the work-in-progress:

https://association-accessors.firstdraft.com/

The Wicked gem has a good README but the example within centers around a signup form. Since my wizard is not for a user model (and thus doesn’t have current_user), and since I have validations that I wanted to enforce at some steps but not others, I found this blog post very helpful:

https://www.joshmcarthur.com/2014/12/23/rails-multistep-forms.html

That post got me 99% of the way, but a few additional notes:

My wizard has conditional logic; it's not a linear path. So my update action has some jump_tos:
```
if step == 'nature' && @association.indirect?
  jump_to(:join_table)
  render_wizard
elsif step == 'foreign_key' && @association.valid?
  jump_to(:name)
  render_wizard
else
  render_wizard @association
end
```
It will be interesting to think about how to generalize this for more complicated wizards. Do we capture the logic in a full-on state machine, and use that to decide where to jump_to?
I re-rendered previous form fields and disabled them to remind the user what they'd already entered, so breaking each form-group into its own partial was very helpful.