Andrzej's Rails tips #2

Changing month names in date_select

Sometimes you may need to change the month names that appear in the date_select (or anywhere in your application). One way of doing it is the following (setting Polish months names):

class Date
  MONTHNAMES = %w{Styczeń Luty Marzec Kwiecień 
                  Maj Czerwiec Lipiec Sierpień 
                  Wrzesień Październik Listopad Grudzień}
end

RSpec Stories, steps with parameters

There is an easy way of reusing steps in RSpec stories.
Let's say you had a following step:

Given a search for chess

which was implemented with a hardcoded value like that:

Given "a search for chess" do
  @search_term = 'chess'
end

And now you'd like to add another, very similar scenario:

Given a search for bridge

You can reuse the previously implemented step by changing the implementation to:

Given "a search for $term" do |term|
  @search_term = term
end

Thanks to that, you can now reuse this step in as many scenarios as you want.

You can find a nice explanation of RSpec stories on Edd Dumbill's blog.