Creating Multiple Flash Messages in Ruby on Rails

Paul Bogard1 Comment

On my Flight Historian application, a number of my pages make use of the flash and flash.now session messages capability for errors, warnings, successes, and informational messages. However, some of those pages needed to have multiple messages of the same type (e.g., multiple warnings), which flash didn’t allow me to do. Additionally, I had some views that were generating status messages of their own (for example, if a collection was empty on a page that had multiple collections), and so I ended up with several ways to generate messages that didn’t output consistent HTML.

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Parsing Boarding Pass Dates in Ruby

Paul BogardLeave a comment

The bar codes on paper or electronic boarding passes contain a good deal of data about a given flight. One of my goals for Flight Historian is to allow me to add a new flight by scanning the bar code, but in order to do that, I need to write a Ruby parser for the data in these boarding passes. This parser will accept bar code data, and return a collection of field names, values, and its interpretation of what those values mean.

One of the more difficult challenges I’m running into, though, is interpreting the date of the flight from the bar code.

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