RoR(Ruby on Rails) in India – Ruby on Rails based Indian Company

Ruby on Rails is creating the storms in the web development all over the world. RoR is even capable to challenge Big Caps like Microsoft’s Asp.NET and so everything else in the specific area. World is continuously changing… The current WEB not solely depends on the old,encoded,paid,stressful technologies but the fresh,open-source,free,joyful technologies like Ruby on Rails are now creating the new highways to connect the WEB… What else ?.. Providing a beautiful atmosphere to web-developers. At the moment the whole world of web-development is cherishing the fresh breeze of RoR.
How much of INDIA is delighted by Ruby on Rails ?
Currently, the INDIAN side of Rails is a small community…but growing at a rapid rate. I am proudly working at VINSOL(New Delhi,India), a company full fledged working on rails.
VINSOL is currently holding some good clients for web-development and providing efficient services in Ruby on Rails.

Captcha in Ruby on Rails – Customize the use of captcha in the plugin validates_captcha

Hello Everyone !!
I have released a captcha plugin Simple Captcha. It is really simple to implement, and provides a cool feature of multiple styles of images.

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Previous Post for validates_captcha

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To implement captcha in RubyonRails, validates_captcha plugin can be a good option but a small customization i need with this plugin was to use it on some specific action and not to be validated the captcha field every time an instance of the model is saved or updated.
Here is a small work-around for its customization…
How to use customized captcha in RoR ?
Install the plugin validates_captcha in your rails application by running this command from the root of your application

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.2750flesk.com/validates_captcha

Make sure that you can now see the directory vedor/plugins/validates_captcha.

Now run these commands from your application root to make the image and data directories

  ruby script/generate captcha store_directory
  ruby script/generate captcha image_directory

Here is the complete API for the usage of this plugin. I am describing the same idea as given in this API but in a bit more specific means.

Lets consider a model User in which we will implement the captcha.
Add the following code in the file app/models/user.rb

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base

    validates_captcha :if => :request_captcha_validation?
    attr_accessor :request_captcha_validation

    def request_captcha_validation?
      (self.request_captcha_validation==true)? true : false
    end

  end

Handle View and Controller

Add the code in the view inside your existing form.

  <% c = prepare_captcha :type => :image -%>
  <%= captcha_hidden_field c, 'user' %>
  <%= captcha_image_tag c %>
  <%= captcha_label 'user', 'Type in the text from the image above' %>
  <%= captcha_text_field 'user' %>

Your controller will look like

  def save
    # the line in bold represents that you need captcha validation.
    # if captcha validation is not required then remove this line from your controller.
    @user = User.new(params[:user])
    @user.request_captcha_validation = true
    @user.save
  end

However image is too noisy and it contains repeated strings.
To improve the quality of images generated by the plugin validates_captcha visit Here.

MicroSoft’s IE-7 Released – another headache for web developers.

Current World’s software giant Microsoft finally released the new milestone IE-7.
Once again web programmers have to reload their guns to cross a new barrirer of all new standards of MicroSoft another thing IE-7.
Its a feel of proud for Microsoft to not to follow the web-standards of W3C and to give themselves a fresh new region of narrow mentality people and a feel of headache for web developers to again customizing their previous running web-sites which already been specially customized to go ok with a mess IE-6 and here is a repeated story again coz the most amazing thing is that IE-7 is even not following the styles of IE-6…

Go FireFox !! Go Flock !!

Using Regular Expression in Ruby on Rails — Regexp for Password Validation

A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp or regex, with plural forms regexps, regexes, or regexen) is a string that describes or matches a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. Regular expressions are used by many text editors and utilities to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain patterns. Many programming languages support regular expressions for string manipulation. Ruby has a strong Regular Expression engine built directly as a class of Ruby Programming language as Regexp
Here we will go through an example which will validate the password string.
Lets say we have to implement the following validations to validate a password…

• Password should contain atleast one integer.
• Password should contain atleast one alphabet(either in downcase or upcase).
• Password can have special characters from 20 to 7E ascii values.
• Password should be minimum of 8 and maximum of 40 cahracters long.

To fulfill above requirements we can have a regular expression like…

/^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$/

in ruby programming language we can have a number of ways to define this regular expression as…
■ reg = Regexp.new(“^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$”)
or
■ reg = %r(^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$)
or simply
■ reg = /^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$/

Now look what exactly this regex is doing…
(?=.*\d) shows that the string should contain atleast one integer.
(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z])) shows that the string should contain atleast one alphabet either from downcase or upcase.
([\x20-\x7E]) shows that string can have special characters of ascii values 20 to 7E.
{8,40} shows that string should be minimum of 8 to maximum of 40 cahracters long.
We can simply use this regular expression for manual handling of password in an action as…

def validate_password(password)

  reg = /^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$/

return (reg.match(password))? true : false

end

How to implement this regular expression in a model class in ruby on rails for password validation ?

To implement this regular expression in the model class in the rails way we can do it like…

class MyModel

  validates_format_of :password, :with => /^(?=.*\d)(?=.*([a-z]|[A-Z]))([\x20-\x7E]){8,40}$/

end

Rake task to prepare test database from migrations

To use your migrations for preparing test database create a file testdb.rake
in the directory lib/tasks.
Now add the following code in the lib/tasks/testdb.rake file…

module Rake
  module TaskManager
    def redefine_task(task_class, args, &block)
      task_name, deps = resolve_args(args)
      task_name = task_class.scope_name(@scope, task_name)
      deps = [deps] unless deps.respond_to?(:to_ary)
      deps = deps.collect {|d| d.to_s }
      task = @tasks[task_name.to_s] = task_class.new(task_name, self)
      task.application = self
      task.add_comment(@last_comment)
      @last_comment = nil
      task.enhance(deps, &block)
      task
    end
  end
  class Task
    class << self
      def redefine_task(args, &block)
        Rake.application.redefine_task(self, args, &block)
      end
    end
  end
end

def redefine_task(args, &block)
  Rake::Task.redefine_task(args, &block)
end

namespace :db do
  namespace :test do

    desc 'Prepare the test database and migrate schema'
    redefine_task :prepare => :environment do
      Rake::Task['db:test:migrate_schema'].invoke
    end

    desc 'Use the migrations to create the test database'
    task :migrate_schema => 'db:test:purge' do
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(ActiveRecord::Base.configurations['test'])
      ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate("db/migrate/")
    end

  end
end

To prepare the test database from migrations run this command
$ rake db:test:migrate_schema

How to improve the image quality and generate random string image in the plugin validates_captcha

Hello Everyone !!
I have released a captcha plugin Simple Captcha. It is really simple to implement, and provides a cool feature of multiple styles of images.

---

Previous post about improving validates_captcha’s images

---

Validates captcha is a good plugin to implement captcha in your rails application.
However i found that there is repetition of the string of the image and the quality of image is not that good. To get a good quality image and random string
something like this

replace the code of the file /vendor/plugins/validates_captcha/lib/captcha_challenge.rb with the following code…

require 'digest/sha1'

module AngryMidgetPluginsInc #:nodoc:

	# CaptchaChallenge
	class CaptchaChallenge

		include CaptchaConfig
		extend CaptchaConfig

		DEFAULT_TTL = 1200#Lifetime in seconds. Default is 20 minutes.

		attr_reader :id, :created_at
		attr_accessor :ttl

		def initialize(options = {}) #:nodoc:
			generate_id

			options = {
				:ttl => config['default_ttl'] || DEFAULT_TTL
			}.update(options)

			self.ttl = options[:ttl]
			@created_at = Time.now

			self.class.prune
		end

		# Implement in subclasses.
		def correct? #:nodoc:
			raise NotImplementedError
		end

	private

		def generate_id #:nodoc:
			self.id = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(Time.now.to_s+rand.to_s)
		end

		def id=(i) #:nodoc:
			@id = i
		end

		def write_to_store #:nodoc:
			store.transaction{
				store[:captchas] = Array.new unless store.root?(:captchas)
				store[:captchas] << self
			}
		end

	class << self

		# Removes old instances from PStore
		def prune
			store.transaction{
				if store.root?(:captchas)
					store[:captchas].each_with_index{|c,i|
						if Time.now > c.created_at+c.ttl
							store[:captchas].delete_at(i)
						end
					}
				end
			}
		end#prune
	end#class << self

	end

	# A CAPTCHA challenge where an image with text is
	# generated. A human can read the text with relative
	# ease, while most robots can not. There are accessibility
	# problems with this challenge, though, as people
	# with reduced or no vision are unlikely to pass the test.
	class CaptchaImageChallenge < CaptchaChallenge

		WORDS = 'gorilla costume, superman, banana bender, chuck norris, xray vision, ahoy me hearties,
				 chunky bacon, latex, rupert murdoch, clap your hands, year 2000,
				 sugar coated, coca cola, rastafarian, airbus a380'.split(/,s+/)
		DEFAULT_DIR = 'captcha'#public/images/captcha
		WRITE_DIR = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', 'images')
		DEFAULT_FILETYPE = 'jpg'

		attr_reader :image
		attr_accessor :string, :dir, :filename, :filetype

		# Creates an image challenge.
	  def initialize(options = {})
			super

			options = {
				:string => config['words'] ? config['words'][rand(config['words'].size)] : WORDS[rand(WORDS.size)],
				:dir => config['default_dir'] || DEFAULT_DIR,
				:filetype => config['default_filetype'] || DEFAULT_FILETYPE
			}.update(options)

            self.string = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(Time.now.to_s)[0..4].upcase #options[:string]
            self.dir = options[:dir]
            self.filetype = options[:filetype]
            self.filename = options[:filename] || generate_filename
            write_to_store
          end

		# Generates the image.
		def generate(options = {})
			options = {
				:fontsize => 50,
				:padding => 20,
				:color => '#000',
				:background => '#fff',
				:fontweight => 'bolw',
				:rotate => true
			}.update(options)

			options[:fontweight] = case options[:fontweight]
				when 'bold' then 700
				else 400
			end

			#added
			text = Array.new
			0.upto(4) do |i|
				text[i] = Magick::Draw.new
				text[i].pointsize = options[:fontsize]
				text[i].font_weight = 600 #options[:fontweight]
				text[i].fill = 'black' #options[:color]
				text[i].gravity = Magick::CenterGravity
				text[i].rotation = (rand(2)==1 ? rand(30) : -rand(30)) if options[:rotate]
			end

                  metric = text[2].get_type_metrics(self.string)
                  #add bg
		  canvas = Magick::ImageList.new
		  fill = Magick::HatchFill.new('white','black')
		  x = metric.width+options[:padding]
		  y = metric.height+options[:padding]

		  #ADDING NOISE

		  img1 = Magick::Image.new(x,y,fill)
		  gc = Magick::Draw.new
		  gc.stroke_linejoin('round')
		  gc.stroke('black')
		  gc.stroke_width(1)
                  100.times do |i|
                    x1 = rand(x)
                    y1 = rand(y)
                    gc.circle(x1,y1,x1.next,y1)
                  end
                  gc.draw(img1)
                  canvas << img1
                  0.upto(4) do |i|
				canvas << Magick::Image.new(metric.width+options[:padding], metric.height+options[:padding]){
					self.background_color = '#000F'
					y_loc = rand(y)
				}.annotate(text[i], 0, 0, (i-2)*30, rand(y/4), self.string[i,1]) #.wave(5, 20)
		  end

		  canvas << Magick::Image.new(metric.width+options[:padding], metric.height+options[:padding]){
		    #changed
		    p = Magick::Pixel.from_color(options[:background])
		    p.opacity = Magick::MaxRGB
		    self.background_color = p
		  }  #.add_noise(Magick::LaplacianNoise)

			self.image = canvas.flatten_images.blur_image(1)
		end

		# Writes image to file.
		def write(dir = self.dir, filename = self.filename)
			self.image.write(File.join(WRITE_DIR, dir, filename))
		end

		# Determine if the supplied +string+ matches
		# that used when generating the image.
		def correct?(string)
			string.downcase == self.string.downcase
		end

		# The full path to the image file, relative
		# to <tt>public/images</tt>.
		def file_path
			File.join(dir,filename)
		end

	class << self

		# Deletes old image files. Also calls CaptchaChallenge.prune
		def prune
			store.transaction{
				if store.root?(:captchas)
					store[:captchas].each_with_index{|c,i|
						if Time.now > c.created_at+c.ttl
							if File.exists?(File.join(WRITE_DIR, c.file_path))
								begin
									File.unlink(File.join(WRITE_DIR, c.file_path))
								rescue Exception
								end
							end
						end
					}
				end
			}
			super
		end#prune
	end#class << self

	private

		def generate_filename #:nodoc:
			self.id+'.'+self.filetype
		end

		def image=(i) #:nodoc:
			@image = i
		end

	end

end

visit Here to view the customized use of the plugin validates_captcha in RoR.

Rake task to remove the image and audio files created by captcha

To add a rake task to the rails application which removes all the image and audio files created by captcha, create a file named remove_captcha_files.rake in the lib/tasks directory.
Add the following code to the lib/tasks/remove_captcha_files.rake file…

desc "Remove captcha images and audio files"
task :remove_captcha_files do
  image_path = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/captcha/"
  audio_path = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/captcha_audio/"
  Dir.foreach(image_path){|file| File.delete(image_path+file) if (/^.*.jpg$/).match(file)} if File.exist?(image_path)
  Dir.foreach(audio_path){|file| File.delete(audio_path+file) if (/^.*.wav$/).match(file)} if File.exist?(audio_path)
  puts "Captcha files removed."
end

You can confirm that task is added to your app by running
rake –task

To remove all the files created by captcha, simply run the command
rake remove_captcha_files
from the command line from your application root.
To better view the code visit here