Handling Advanced Database Features with Rails
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In this third part of a five-part series on databases and Ruby-on-Rails, you will learn how to add upload progress notification; you'll also learn how to handle some database features. This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book
Advanced Rails, written by Brad Ediger (O'Reilly; ISBN: 0596510322).Copyright © 2008 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.
Upload progress
One feature that many applications require is upload progress notification: showing the user a progress bar that indicates how much of the file has been uploaded. This is surprisingly hard and server-dependent, but there are tools to make it easier. For simplicity, we will restrict discussion in this section to the Mongrel application server.
Mongrel serializes Rails requests; at any given time, a single Mongrel process can only execute one Rails request. This is required because ActionController is not thread-safe. But upload progress requires two simultaneous requests: the upload itself as well as AJAX requests to check its progress. How do we reconcile this?
The answer is that Mongrel is very conservative about what it locks; it only serializes requests while they are actually executing controller code. While the file is being transferred, Mongrel buffers it into memory, but during that time it allows other requests to complete. When the file transfer completes, Mongrel processes that Rails request all at once, only locking during the time the Rails code executes.
The mongrel_upload_progress gem hooks into Mongrel to provide a shared variable that the multiple requests can use to communicate about the status of file uploads. This variable is accessible to the Rails handler as Mongrel::Uploads. A simple Rails action (called via AJAX) calls Mongrel::Uploads.check(upload_id) to check the status and update the client.
Though all of this complication makes it possible to use just one Mongrel process, most moderately trafficked applications will require multiple Mongrels. All actual Rails requests are still serialized, so the number of requests being processed in Rails concurrently is limited to the number of Mongrel processes. However, the shared-memory solution used previously does not work with more than one Mongrel--each Mongrel is a separate process and they have no shared memory.
The solution is to use DRb (Distributed Ruby). A background process is started as a shared repository for upload status. Each upload handler notifies the background process of its status via DRb as it receives blocks from the file. The Rails handlers can then query the common backend for the status of any file, regardless of which Mongrel handled the original upload or status request.
The upload progress gem can be installed with
gem install mongrel_upload_progress. A sample Rails application illustrating how to use the gem is located at http://svn.techno- weenie.net/projects/mongrel_upload_progress/. The official Mongrel upload progress documentation is available at http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/upload_progress.html.
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