ahabman

So I’ll never have to write another has_and_belongs_to_many view again, here’s a plugin that dynamically makes 2 <ul> lists which you drag and drop both ways to manage the association.

http://svn.ahabman.com/public/many_to_many_view/

From the readme:

Assumming you have an @project var and you want to associate people with it.

<div id="m2m_container">

<%= render :partial => "shared/m2m", :locals => {

:thing => @project,

:association => 'people',

:association_attr => 'first_name' }   %>

</div>

:thing take the current object
:association takes the pluralized association, a string.
:association_attr takes the attribute of the associated object that will be displayed.

You can’t use class variables in rails.  Unless you’d like to develop in production mode (specifically with config.cache_classes = true).  In development mode all classes are reloaded on each request, which clears all class variables.

I had the perfect place to use them - while running a mass synchronization, and needing to store the timestamp (I couldn’t use the latest last_updated from each record).  It worked perfect in ./script/console but failed entirely through the browser.