The original code for the helper class, when executed in Rails3, was rendering escaped HTML for the tab bodies, and nothing for the tab headers. Simply changing the call in the view to tabs.render to this:

tabs.render.html_safe

didn’t do the trick for unescaping the tab bodies. What ended up working was using this for the TabsRenderer class:

class TabsRenderer

  def initialize(template, options={})
    @template = template
    @options = options
    @tabs = []
  end

  def create(tab_id, tab_text, options={}, &block)
    raise "Block needed for TabsRenderer#CREATE" unless block_given?
    @tabs << [tab_id, tab_text, options, block]
  end

  def render
    content_tag(:div, (render_tabs.html_safe + render_bodies.html_safe), {:id => :tabs}.merge(@options))
  end

  private #  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

  def render_tabs
    content_tag(:ul, render_headers.html_safe)
  end

  def render_headers
    @tabs.collect do |tab|
      content_tag(:li, link_to(content_tag(:span, tab[1]), "##{tab[0]}") )
    end.to_s
  end

  def  render_bodies
    @tabs.collect do |tab|
      content_tag(:div, capture(&tab[3]), tab[2].merge(:id => tab[0]))
    end.to_s
  end

  def method_missing(*args, &block)
    @template.send(*args, &block)
  end

end

Everything else about the sample code on the original post can be used as originally presented.

Hope this helps you as you adjust to Rails3!

I settled on using the email-veracity gem by Carsten Nielsen for validations. It is available from the gem site at github.

Great. Now I was able to play around with validating emails from irb, but what about in my app? Hmm…

I started digging around in the source code for the ActiveRecord class, wondering how I might create my own validation macro to use email-veracity. That was going ok until I couldn’t figure out how to access the error collection for my ActiveRecord object. Thankfully, that sent me back to scouring the web for a lead on another way to skin this cat.

Now with a fresher mind than when I’d last been in the ActiveRecord source, I looked around some more and took a close look at the validates_each macro. This is what I wound up with.

Note: You can get cleanly formatted copies of the code excerpts below from gist.github.com.

This gives basic validation as to format of the address supplied. Now, in another model, I wanted to confirm that the address not only was of good form, but that the domain in the email address belonged to the customer’s domain as recorded in the database.

Is this a perfect solution? There will be varied opinions on that question. It is a working solution, but comes at the price of adding EmailVeracity to those of your ActiveRecord instances where you want to validate email addresses. You’ll have to judge whether that tradeoff is a reasonable one for your application.

EmailVeracity can do many other things, including finding the MX hosts for a given address’s domain name. Now you’re talking about an operation that necessitates a network call, which could fail or timeout, so you typically would not want to include such methods in a validation sequence.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy!