/bin/recykl

I like MagicDraw as a versatile CASE open to customizations. But recently, I’ve found this in the official MagicDraw javadoc:

Well, you can’t say the OpenAPI is missing open (ended) documentation, can you?

Update: For a start, I’ve created an index of MagicDraw 14.0 OpenAPI examples. You may find it useful – place it in
.

I was checking my rail stat data and I did find this.

It seems that Google is really the best search engine. Even people from Yahoo are using it. :o)

Web developer often comes to a situation where he needs to “decorate” a block of a page. There is a simple solution and simple and elegant solution.
Helpers concept in Ruby on Rails is very powerful and will be used to do the trick.

Imagine, you want to create a rounded box helper similar to Nifty Corners (http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html), but you do not want to use javascript. So, a handy helper needs to be created.
The principle of the Nifty Corners trick is adding few b tags before content, few b tags after it and few lines to CSS.

<div id="container">
<b class="rtop">
  <b class="r1"></b> <b class="r2"></b> <b class="r3"></b> <b class="r4"></b>
</b>
<!--content goes here -->
<b class="rbottom">
  <b class="r4"></b> <b class="r3"></b> <b class="r2"></b> <b class="r1"></b>
</b>
</div>

and modification of CSS

.rtop, .rbottom{display:block}
.rtop *, .rbottom *{display: block; height: 1px; overflow: hidden}
.r1{margin: 0 5px;}
.r2{margin: 0 3px;}
.r3{margin: 0 2px;}
.r4{margin: 0 1px; height: 2px;}
.r1, .r2, .r3, .r4 {background-color:red;}
.cont{background-color:red;}

Easy solution

The easy solution uses two helpers. One to put before the content and one to put it after. So, the view could look like:

...
<%= round_box_start %>
content
<%= round_box_end %>
...

Well, it does not look good. So, what about the other solution?

Easy and elegant solution

We will create a block level helper. The view will look much better.

...
<% round_box do %>
content
<% end %>
...

Now, let’s create the helper:

def round_box(&block)
  b = '<div id="container"><b class="rtop"><b class="r1"></b><b class="r2"></b><b class="r3"></b><b class="r4"></b></b><div class="cont">'
  e = '</div><b class="rbottom"><b class="r4"></b> <b class="r3"></b> <b class="r2"></b> <b class="r1"></b></b></div>'
 
  # Get the data from the block 
  data = capture(&block)
 
  res = b + data + e
 
  # Use concat method to pass text back to the view 
  concat(res, block.binding)
end

Good, but works only for red boxes. How to pass another color? Simply:

...
<% round_box(color) do %>
content
<% end %>
...

and in helper

def round_box(color, &block)
  b = '<div id="container"><b class="rtop"><b class="r1"></b><b class="r2"></b><b class="r3"></b><b class="r4"></b></b><div class="cont">'
  e = '</div><b class="rbottom"><b class="r4"></b> <b class="r3"></b> <b class="r2"></b> <b class="r1"></b></b></div>'
 
  # Get the data from the block 
  data = capture(&block)
 
  res = b + data + e
 
  # Use concat method to pass text back to the view 
  concat(res, block.binding)
end

Final implementation of the colored box is left as a homework :o)

Grails log is verbose… very verbose. I got used to the Rails one, especially for the stack traces. Most of the time I am not interested in hundreds of messages about Hibernate not being happy with the parameter I did pass to it. Most of the time the problem is on my side and I want to know which object is it and which line of code.

So, i did a small trick with egrep. I run the grails application using this command:

grails run-app | egrep -v "at [a-z]+"

Sometime I have to go to my log file to check more details, but over 80% this is more than enough.

Welcome to WordPress!

We have moved to a new blogging platform and on that occasion we have also introduced a fresh new graphical design. Otherwise, all things should remain as you know them – good old articles with comments, permalinks, categories etc.

Should you miss something, don’t hesitate to leave a comment here.