This Week in Rails

August 11, 2023

A new release, Action Mailer preview empty states, bugfixes and more!

Hi, it’s Greg, bringing you the latest changes in the Rails codebase.

Introducing the Rails Luminary Awards: Nominations Now Open
Starting at Rails World in October, the Rails Foundation will establish a new tradition of celebrating Rails Luminaries- people who’ve contributed to the Rails ecosystem and community with exceptional code, documentation, enthusiasm, or assistance, thereby helping others do more, learn more, or be inspired.
You can submit your 2023 Rails Luminary nomination here.

Rails 7.0.7 has been released
There is a new minor release for Rails 7 with minor fixes and improvements.

Removes Webpacker from the guides index page
As a follow-up to the deprecation of Webpacker, it is removed from the Rails Guides in this pull request.

Action Mailer Preview empty states
When an application defines mailers without any corresponding previews, requests to GET /rails/mailers return a page with a blank <body> element.
Similarly, when an ActionMailer::Preview subclass is defined, but doesn’t declare any actions, the response contains a mostly empty page.
This pull request renders empty-state messaging for both scenarios, and links to the Action Mailer Basics guides.

Fix NoMethodError when request Content-Type is blank.
This pull request changes the mime type lookup to use the safe navigation operator on the call to rstrip to handle the case when a client makes a request with a blank Content-Type header.

Adds Arel::FactoryMethods#cast(node, type)
CAST(field as type) is a widely supported SQL function. This pull request adds native Arel support for this named function with a cast(field, type) helper. Example of usage:
Product.arel_table.cast(product_table[:position], "integer")
# produces: CAST("products"."position" as integer)


Rename fixture_file_upload method to file_fixture_upload
This pull request renames the fixture_file_upload method to file_fixture_upload to match the order of words in file_fixture and file_fixture_path.
To preserve backward compatibility, it declares a fixture_file_upload alias to be preserved into the future.

Active Storage mirror uploads should be asynchronous
When you define a Mirror service in storage.yml , the upload to the mirror actually happens inline, instead of using ActiveStorage::MirrorJob.
This slows down any uploads to the service, because it is performed n times (n being the number of mirrors), inline, instead of using the ActiveStorage::MirrorJob.
This pull request changes this behavior to only upload the file to the primary service synchronously and then enqueue a job to upload the file to the mirrors asynchronously.

You can view the whole list of changes here. We had 22 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!
Until next time!

About This Week in Rails

Your weekly inside scoop of interesting commits, pull requests and more from Rails.