Ruby on Rails - rails 3.0 issues

Ruby on Rails - rails 3.0 issues with will_paginate

About a month ago I made the move to rails 3, and I could swear my apps worked, but maybe I didn't test thoroughly. Anyway, things are broken now, and I get the message (when I try to paginate a bunch of results from a database query):

Cannot convert nil to array

A google search on "rails paginate convert nil to array" gets a bunch of hits, and there seems to be two basic lines of advice. One is to convert to the "rails 3 right way" which doesn't seem to use will_paginate -- someday we will tackle this. The other line of advice is that I need to use a certain version of will_paginate and I am advised to add the following to my Gemfile:

gem 'will_paginate', '3.0pre2'

Before I do this, I simple do a bundle update, but this does not solve the problem (it installs will_paginate 3.0.0), so I do as instructed and follow up with:

bundle update

This time it tells me it is Using will_paginate (3.0.pre2). I don't see things fixed, so I restart my webserver and voila, this pagination issue is fixed (another issue now rears its ugly head - such is the rails way).

html_safe

The other issue (it doesn't really belong here, but what the heck) is that my application spits out a big table, and I mark some words in the result with html markup (namely <b>) and now with rails 3 I am seeing the markup rather than bold face. This is weird deja vu (kinda) of a similar problem I had some years ago with mongrel, but that is actually irrelevant it turns out. What I did to fix the problem was to change a single line in my application to:

   <td><%= text.html_safe %></td>

And after this, I was satisfied. Apparently the html_safe method sets an attribute on the string telling rails not to screw with it later.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Ruby on Rails notes / tom@mmto.org