Wrapping up the week on a super positive note!

Over the past few weeks we receiving a nice boost in our new user sign ups over at Gaboogie’s Conference Call Service due to some significant improvements in our Google rankings. Today were were awarded the Red Herring Canada Top 50 award in the category of Communications to go along with our other awards and recognition.

We continue to steadily gain more and more momentum. Thank you to all our supporters and Red Herring Canada for the recognition.

I first ran up against this issue of using email addresses rather then the standard usernames with ActiveResource when I was doing the Lighthouse integration for the administrative interface on Lypp. Now with Lypp running our Mashup Contest against the APIs over at 37Signals I’m seeing a lot of Rails developers getting stuck on this same issue.

A fix has made it into Rails a while ago: Rails Trac Ticket #11112

Here are some of the error snippets for search indexing purposes.

URI::InvalidURIError: bad URI(is not URI?): https://username@example.com:password@dev1.lypp.com/users/9999

 ...

URI::InvalidComponentError: bad component(expected userinfo component or user component): username@example.com

We all wish we could run on edge rails all the time across all our projects but reality is we don’t always have that luxury.

Real simple test class to test basic calls with.

Add this file to a blank rails project.

# apps/models/conference.rb
class Conference < ActiveResource::Base
  self.site = 'https://lypp.com/users/9999'
  self.site.user = 'username@example.com'
  self.site.password = 'password'
end

Jump to the console.

./script/console 
Loading development environment (Rails 2.0.2)
>> Conference.find(:all)

If you get any of the above errors. Here is a code snippet to put in one of your project’s initializers to get pass this issue if you are stuck at an incompatible ActiveResource version.

# config/initializers/url_fix.rb
module URI
  class Generic
    def check_user_with_escaped_username(user)
      check_user_without_escaped_username(escape_userpass(user))
    end
    alias_method_chain :check_user, :escaped_username
  end
end

Enjoy!

I hope you found this post before you got to frustrated or discouraged…

Here are some great resources to move you along a little further once you get past this.

Railscast Episode #94: ActiveResource Basics

Railscast Episode #95: More on ActiveResource

I really need to make the time contribute my 5 tips for the Railscast 100th episode contest. The iPod would be nice but really just want to give a little back to what I think is hands down the best FREE resource for getting going with Rails.