My final blogpost, for now. What a journey it has been. Right before the project mode weeks started, I was doing my usual panic because I could not think of a good idea for an app, when finally it hit me. I would make a application for reviewing concerts because it wasn’t something that I had not seen exist, and I was desperate to integrate an external API - to make it real, ya know? I quickly learned that it was not as easy as one might think. I ended applying for around 4 or 5 keys from different APIs. Apparently some services need to approve you and have all these stipulations for using their data. Jeez. It was about a week into the project and I still had not heard back from the one I wanted to use the most. Luckily, one of them answered and I was able to continue creating my magnum opus. So first bit of advice, if you’re going to use an external API, apply for a key ASAP.
Last blog post I spoke about how to user Rails Active Storage to upload files and attach them to your models. This time I’m going to talk about how to do the same thing…but with AJAX! So basically I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out and so I hope I can save you some time by showing what I did. First thing you need to wrap the form your submitting in a FormData object. From Mozilla- “The FormData interface provides a way to easily construct a set of key/value pairs representing form fields and their values, which can then be easily sent using the XMLHttpRequest.send() method. It uses the same format a form would use if the encoding type were set to “multipart/form-data”.”
This project was by far, the most involved, invigorating, and infuriating project of the bootcamp. I learned way more than I expected to learn (was definitely a victim of scope creep), and I can safely say I am a rails…novice. Truly this framework is so vast I feel like I have barely cracked the surface of what it can do. I did not want to do the bare minimum so I decided I wanted to make something that a) I would be passionate about, and b) people might want to use.
We recently have started learning Ruby on Rails, the topic of what seems like every coding podcast ever. It’s exciting. This is really the first section that starts to make me feel like I’m really doing this (think I said this for sinatra too).
So last project I made a blog post giving some tips for succeeding in your project. I figured on this go around I can do the same thing. Here are the 3 biggest things that helped me: