Cacheable Date Helper – Making your caching-experience more fun!

cacheable_date_helper aims to add some alternatives to some of the built-in date-helpers in rails, specifically to help avoid problems with caching.

Requirements

  • Rails 3.x (Not tested with Rails 3.1)

  • Jquery

  • gem ‘babilu’

Installation

In your gemfile:

gem 'cacheable_date_helper'

Then run the installation-generator, which will add two javascript-files to your public/javascripts folder

rails generate cacheable_date_helper:install

Include the javascript-files in your layout:

<%= javascript_include_tag ['date','locales','cacheable_date_helper'] %>

Note the extra ‘locales’ reference. This is a reference to the locales.js file that the babilu gem automatically generates. You can leave this reference out, if you’re already using the babilu gem and have the locales.js referenced elsewhere.

Usage

  • time_ago_in_words

Have you ever tried caching pages where this helper is used? It’s no fun at all!

Imagine you have a page, where you print out a list of comments, and on each comment you print out a time_ago_in_words string for when the comment was created. Then imagine that you page_cache this page indefinitely and sweep it when a comment is added, removed or edited. What happens then with the time_ago_in_word strings? - They only change when the page is sweeped! So you risk having a page where a comment is marked as created “less than a minute ago” even though it might be years since that comment was created.

cacheable_date_helper to the rescue!

What you can do instead, is use cacheable_date_helper’s cacheable_time_ago_in_words method, which instead of outputting a time_ago_in_words-string simply outputs the date localized with the :short format. Furthermore the date is put in a span-tag with some HTML5-data attributes that stores the UTC-version of the date. Then when the page loads, an unobtrusive piece of javascript-code finds all these span-tags and replaces their content with a similar time_ago_in_words string based on their respective UTC-date and the local time on the clients computer. The javascript that generates the time_ago_in_words string is a direct port of the original rails-version, and even uses your rails locale-files to generate the strings (with help from the babilu gem).

Example:

cacheable_time_ago_in_words(Time.zone.now - 2 minutes) # => <span class="time_ago_in_words" data-timestamp="Mon Jul 18 12:21:12 UTC 2011" data-include-seconds="false">18 Jul 14:21</span>

Which will be replaced by the client-side javascript with:

2 minutes ago

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License