Robby on Rails

Wow, that really is the smallest plugin ever. Though in my opinion it really should have an option for a “start date”. A lot of my code has something like, “Copyright 2004-2008” or some such on it. Not really necessary, but it’s a good way of tracking when a particular project first started. Then again, that would require some sort of a database lookup or something so then it would no longer be the world’s smallest plugin.

Shouldn’t you be able to pass in a starting year to generate a range for copyright coverage? “Copyright 2007 – 2008” If you’re starting in 2008, you’d want to do something like current_year(2008) so that come New Years it would spit out “2008 – 2009”.

(goes back to causing trouble elsewhere…)

What about Timezone support?

Hehe. What about using 08 instead of 2008?

Sorry…but, why not just put this in your Footer

<= Time.now.strftime(‘%Y’) -> ?

Nice plugin. I do the same thing for every project in my ApplicationHelper. It actually used to be my most embarassing code, due to how large it was compared to what it did.

I’m actually proud of it now, since I got it down to one line:

def copyright_dates(start_year = Date.today().year)
    [start_year, Date.today().year].sort.uniq.join(" - ")
end

@Robby: Woot! Résumé’d. Glad I could help.

Seriously… can someone tell me why you need a helper for this and not just put the code itself in your view. I can see why the range would be useful, but without it you are just wrapping Ruby syntax into a helper. I don’t see why you can’t just put <= Time.now.strftime(‘%Y’) -> in your view?

I’m more surprised no-one’s mentioned you can just use <%= Time.now.year %> .. which is even easier and perfectly readable to even a non-developer.

@Peter: Party pooper. Occam’s Razor party pooper.

+1 Peter

Also, it seems weird that you’d create a plugin for something so small. You still need to remember to add that particular plugin to all your apps.

-1 Robby, bad Robby

my god, another gem to load…. not memory footprint friendly…

This is not about rails or being DRY, this is about good practices when releasing a website. Just put a Time.now.year in your layout and you’re done.

Does this plugin have a rake task which combs through 500.html, 404.html and 422.html in public/ – examines them for last year’s number value, and replaces that value with this years?

Robby,

I was starting to wonder if you’d fell and hit your head and forgot everything that you knew about Ruby on Rails. Underneath the same code is getting called whether is be the plugin or the code in the view.

Our team has a rule for views and that’d be: No model calls! While Date or Time isn’t a Rails model, it isn’t something that we’d really wanting to invoke directly from a view. This is why we have helpers to provide easier-to-read helpers for editing HTML. Moving it into a plugin seems a bit overkill if you’re only working on a few projects a year but if you’re working on 40,50+ applications each year than it become tedious to copy these helpers into each of your application helpers.

So, it really depends on where you draw the line. Maybe helpers like this belong in Rails-code?

I don’t think it’s legally sound to just assert copyright every year if the work in question hasn’t been changed in a significant way.

Don’t break the law, Robby.

DRY (a)

Hahaha, I love it!

DRY (a)

Hahaha, I love it!

@BadRobbie:

Whoops I didn’t checked your tags :) However, I don’t forsee anything good teaching DRYness with a single Time.now.year to replace which is in a way enough DRY as I only use it in my layout (c’mon, it’s just a few bytes and it’s clean enough) and pretty meaningfull as well.

Regarding error pages, I do have the ol’good ExceptionNotifier plugin and 2 private methods I overwrite in application.rb

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include ExceptionNotifiable

  private
    def render_404
      respond_to do |type|
        type.html { render :template => 'errors/404', :status => 404, :layout => true }
        type.all  { render :nothing => true, :status => 404 }
      end
    end

    def render_500
      respond_to do |type|
        type.html { render :template => 'errors/500', :status => 500, :layout => true }
        type.all  { render :nothing => true, :status => 500 }
      end
    end
end

Of course, you have to tune your main layout so that it won’t be broken when rendering error pages: I meant no embedded code (MVC, remember?)

In case of really critical error, I still have a static public/500.html the proxy will use if rails is down or drunk.

BTW sorry if I hurt you; now I owe you a hug.

Seriously… Date.today.year

For a range? “2006-#{Date.today.year}”

o_O

Here’s a helper I wrote for one of my last projects:

module CopyrightHelper
  def copyright(year, now=Time.now)
    if now.year == year
      year.to_s
    elsif year / 1000 == now.year / 1000 # same century
      year.to_s + "–" + now.year.to_s[-2..3]
    else
      year.to_s + "–" + now.year.to_s
    end
  end
end

if $0 == __FILE__
  require 'test/unit'
  class CopyrightHelperTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
    include CopyrightHelper

    def test_should_return_year_if_copyright_year_is_the_same
      assert_equal "2000", copyright(2000, Time.local(2000))
    end
    def test_should_return_year_range_minus_century_if_the_same_century
      assert_equal "2000&ndash;01", copyright(2000, Time.local(2001))
    end
    def test_should_return_full_year_range_if_different_century
      assert_equal "1999&ndash;2000", copyright(1999, Time.local(2000))
    end
  end
end

Using the correct separator entity, and good for the next 91 years of this century and beyond :)

Whether it’s worth pluginising is up to you (my general feeling would be no, it’s not)

It might feel nice to have the current year on your site. However, there’s no legal reason or need to do so (I know, but it’s true) if you haven’t materially made changes to your site (i.e. rewrote code) that year. And actually, having the current date as copyright generated by code rather than written by a person might hurt your case were it in court!

Sorry, I am a bit confused. Do you really think it’s a good idea to have a copyright notice plugin? Of course the copyright notice in a shared footer is a no-brainer. But a plugin? Really? I am going to assume you might, but if not, then sorry.

As I was getting started with RoR, one of my little joys was seeing the reasonably good date/time implementations. Having come from Java where you have to do a whole bunch of stupid, unintuitive things, it seemed like a breath of fresh air. So I added the @copy; Time.now.year code in my footer. Is this not DRY enough?

I love the DRY mantra, but like all assertions of “good programming practice” you have to balance the trade-off between actual value and the increase in complexity.

Having a copyright plugin that supports all known use-cases of copyright would be, as this conversation has begun to show, a fool’s errand. The only “canonical” aspect of this is the copyright symbol, which is neatly wrapped in an HTML entity. Everything else is variable. So why try to solve all variants of the problem in one place when it is almost certain that any specific user would use one and only one of them.

The good message here is: put your copyright message into the footer … ONCE, then forget it forever. That’s DRY.

Any plugin creates any number of dependencies and levels of indirection, which are synonymous with fragility and complexity. This cost is worthwhile when the plugin does something really useful and may get extended (one example: calendar_date_select). If the idea is all we need, we need to be happy that everyone is just putting their little spin on how they present their copyright, and that they are doing it once in their footer partial and let it go at that.

In the Java world, and in OO programming in general, it seems like developers tend to go off the deep end in making things abstract and indirect. Things start off pretty simple and straightforward. Then someone comes up with a “better” solution that solves more problems. But the code is more complex. And that is a cost: it’s harder to use, harder to test, bigger footprint, etc. What happened to KISS? In my mind, that is even more important than DRY.

Stop the madness and know when enough is enough!

Tom :-)

Do it a little quicker just by using this in your view:

<%= Time.now.year %>