I ticked the wrong box

I just installed the VerseLogic wordpress OpenID plugin. This means that you guys (if you have an OpenID already) don’t have to explicitly register on my site to comment. You can just log in with your OpenID, and an account will be created here for you. No more passwords!

You can get a free OpenID at http://myopenid.com/

To find out more about OpenID, check it all out here.

Grrr, just spent a little while playing with the “select” form tag in rails. Pain in the ass. The issue I was having is that I want to give users an option of 2 values with a default selected value on the “new” form. I also have a edit form that I want to let users update their objects with, and again, only 2 values. These values are static, and I didn’t want to have the pain of creating a db table, and an object to represent it. That would result in unnecessary code, and unnecessary database hits.

The issue with the “select” tag is that I cannot determine how to set the selected value, without using a collection of objects. I had a look for a solution for this problem, and found this site. This gave me a helper that lets me put in an object, with some methods to get the value and text options for my option set. that was alright. But, I didn’t want the full object model to be supported. I was after a very simple implementation with using a hash, and a string as the selected value.

I hacked around with the code, and this is what I came up with. Please feel free to pillage this.

def hash_select_with_current(object, method, hash, current_value)
result = “
”
hash.each do |key, value|
if current_value == value
result << "
#{key}

”
else
result << "

#{key}

”
end
end
result << "

”
return result
end
[/source]

Hope that’s useful for someone.

Woohoo! I got PayPal IPN integration working. Now you can register with my application, make a payment via PayPal, and PayPal will come back to my web app and let me know that you’ve registered. Clever stuff.

I used the PayPal IPN GEM from http://dist.leetsoft.com, and integrated it with my own Payment object. I don’t really have the need for a full “ordering”-type system with my application. There is only ever 1 line item per order, so only a single payment object is required. I could have implemented an order, with order_line_items, and shipping and billing addresses, and tax and handling calculations, but I don’t need them.

I need to look into the IPN integration a little more tho. When I say I’ve got it working, I mean I’ve had 1 payment through that successfully updated a users registration details. PayPal seem to be pushing the transaction to me twice – I handle that correctly (checking for unique transaction IDs), but I think I need to respond to them in some other way. I better re-read those docs.

I’m quite pleased. Maybe a congratulatory coffee & and an apple are in order.

I had a bit of a play with the Money and Paypal GEMs available at http://dist.leetsoft.com . The Money API only supports Euro, US and Canadian dollars. For my paypal integration, I need to support Australian dollar (as dirty old paypal don’t support NZD). So, I’ve extended the Money class to create an AUD implementation. There’s nothing special about it, but if you’re too lazy to write the couple of lines of code yourself, here it is.

Also, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting the Money and Paypal GEMs to work. The issue is that from within a rails controller it doesn’t recognise the Money or Paypal classes. It can’t find them. This is the only GEM that I’m having troubles with. My solution was to import the .rb files into the /vendor directory. If anyone has this problem, or has a solution for this problem – or even tips, please let me know. It’s annoying me now.

If I can get this working, I won’t bother with my own IPN implementation. Why reinvent the wheel?