One way to group elements in HTML is to assign them a name attribute. Multiple elements can share a name, then you can easily access them as an array using the getElementsByName() method.

The problem is that some DOM parsers aren't keen on, or are ignorant to, this use of the name attribute, so a simple object.name returns undefined. In my case, it was a DIV in Firefox 1.5 that was behaving this way.

There is a simple work around for this that works in Firefox, I haven't tested it in others. It is to use the getAttribute method that is an extension of any element object.

This ability can be useful if you have a function that performs a transformation on the active element, and another transformation on closely related elements.

From time to time you may have reasons to override the default find method that ActiveRecord provides. In this example, we'll store a side-copy of the record attributes so that we have some basis for discovering changes to the data.

note: this will not override dynamic finders such as find_by_id

I'm in the process of writing test fixtures for our rails site. A lot of my tests require authentication, so I've had to port our permissions system into a fixture. Rather than type out all of the information for the fixture, I decided to create a nested loop that will take care of this for me.

There's probably a rake task for this, but I wasn't able to find it, so I came up with my own solution. You'll have to do a little cleanup when it's done, however some slight mods to this loop could even eliminate that.

When doing a lot of testing in script/console, you often have to reload to pickup changes in DB schema, models and libs. The process of quitting the console and restarting it can become incredibly tedious amidst bugtracking.

note: I don't believe this reloads items in the libs dir