My second time trying to do this project and i can say i have learned different ways of doing things. Firstly i used scaffolding to make the rails api again like last time but this time i used to devise to handle the user signup and authentication. The scaffolding made the the models, controllers, routes, and migations with configurations of my own here and there to make the front end work properly when retrieving data. I than configured the development files to work with devise properly and configured cors to allows authorization headers and all origins.
This project was pretty straightforward except one thing i couldn’t get down for some reason. First off making the rails api was pretty easy, i used scaffolding to make the models, controllers, routes, and migrations. The way scaffolding makes these things allows me to not have to setup serializers because the data im using or imputing is not too complex, scaffolding has it set up to where it does that work for me. I than setup my cors.rb files in my config>initializers folder to allow it to communicate with my frontend. With that my rails api was done and i moved onto my front-end.
The rails project was far more complex than the sinatra one in my opinion. Sure rails has a huge amount of shortcuts but tons more files that are altered than sinatra. So for starters, i coded a good bit of my rails website before i even tested it with rails s and i ended up regretting this due to the fact that i ran into a problem with ‘yarn’. Yarn is a dependency file that rails 6+ requires without it being a gem. This caused problems that made me not able to run ‘rails s’, so i downloaded yarn uninstalled the gem and tried again but still no good. After googling for about an hour or two and trying about 8 different ‘fixes’, i finally found a fix for yarn and got my rails s working. I felt like it was important to include this in my rails blog because i felt that i learned a good amount of knowledge about troubleshooting compatibility issues or gem problems and finding a fix for them.
So for my sinatra project, i made a website that allows a user to make review for a game of their choice and allow others to see it. At first when i was looking at references of the file structure and code, i was overwhelmed by the constant back and forth between files. It literally made my eyes and head spin, but eventually i understood how each file went back and forth. I struggled a good bit trying to get the current user id to display the reviews only for that user, but eventually i found a forum that showed a “slug” method that i could use in place of it. I was using something along the lines of "/reviews/current_user.id/view_all but that was failing, but with the slug method i was able to do /reviews/<%= current_user.slug %>/view_all and it worked great. Not entirely sure why its called slug, but it worked. Than i ran into another issue, i was using erb references in post methods in the controllers which caused my website to go crazy. After some investigating on previous work on flatiron and a forum, i discovered that post methods in the controllers should only use redirect and not erb, because it causes issues. Once i fixed that i proceeded to the reviews controller, my last controller to code, it was annoying at first because of the issue i discussed earlier, but thanks to slug it worked. Afterwards i ended up putting several fail messages for incorrect input in various places and made the website look a little better with buttons instead of blue text everywhere. It was tough, i ran into so many errors but i did it. It’s definately not a pretty website, but i’ll improve with time.
This was my first project that I was assigned in flatiron and it showed me some interesting things about how OOP worked and how to scrape a website. Before i even started my project, i struggled to get the local environment for it to work and had to get some assistance from one of my cohort leads. The problem was that my computer wasn’t allowing my terminal to connect properly and after about two or so hours total of messing with the settings, we finally got it to work. The next issue was that despite being properly set up, the terminal would only connect sometimes and the only fix i had at the time was restarting my computer and immediately opening up vscode. I later found out with some testing, that my antivirus was affecting the terminal from connecting, so i gave it access and i was finally ready to start my project.