Recently at work, the web admin for the computer science department came into our lab and told us that my employer’s site was broken. The admin had need to make all .php files not act as PHP scripts, and instead, all files with the extension .sphp would now run as PHP scripts. Since my employer’s site was built using PHP, that meant all of its pages were showing the source code instead of actually executing. I had to whip up a quick Ruby script in order to:

Sometimes it would be useful to tell users of your Ruby on Rails application if there is a problem in the database, such as some foreign keys are invalid. As an example, let’s assume you have two models, Book and Author, such that each Book has an author_id which connects with Author via its primary key, id. That is, the tables are: books(id, author_id) and authors(id). Each table probably has fields other than that, but those are the only fields we need to worry about. Below is a method that generates an unordered HTML list for display to the users: