Placing Multiple Button_To on the Same Line – Ruby on Rails

This is a problem that had me confused for an embarrassingly long time. Rails wraps button_to elements within a form and a div. Unfortunately this will take up 100% of the available width. Thankfully the solution is pretty straight forward – simply wrap buttons in a div and float them left like so:

    
'button'%>
'button' %>

A wrapper div isn’t strictly necessary however I usually add one just to be safe. While this will probably give a bunch of designers another reason to hate developers, I find that wrapping floated elements seems to save a lot of headaches when making changes down the track.

Using the code above you may also find that the divs aren’t filling as expected, simply add a div with a ‘clear:both’ style to the bottom of the wrapper:

'button'%>
'button' %>

Hopefully that doesn’t take anywhere near as long for you guys to figure out as it did me, time for a coffee break I think. Good luck!

How to View a Table’s Structure – Sqlite3

Just a quick post on how to view a table’s structure in SQLite3. Again, not something I’ve broken yet – more something I seem to keep forgetting. Simply start Sqlite:
chris@chris-VirtualBox:~/site$ sqlite3 -line db/development.sqlite3
SQLite version 3.7.4
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”

Then enter the following: – substituting orders for whatever your table name happens to be:
sqlite> pragma table_info(orders);
cid = 0
name = id
type = INTEGER
notnull = 1
dflt_value =
pk = 1

cid = 1
name = user_id
type = integer
notnull = 0
dflt_value =
pk = 0

cid = 3
name = created_at
type = datetime
notnull = 0
dflt_value =
pk = 0

Good Luck!

View All Tables – Sqlite3

Not really something that I’ve broken (yet), but definitely something I found useful when starting out with rails – how to view all tables:

Start Sqlite3 i.e.
chris@chris-VirtualBox:~/site$ sqlite3 -line db/development.sqlite3
SQLite version 3.7.4
Enter “.help” for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a “;”

Then simply enter the following:
sqlite> .tables
carts message_recipients products taggings
categories message_statuses schema_migrations tags
comments messages store_pages user_settings
images order_items store_settings users
line_items orders stores
locations product_images sub_orders
sqlite>

Good Luck!