acts_as_taggable_on :weirdness

I’ve spent a large part of my day tracking down a very weird behavior in the acts_as_taggable_on plugin.  I am using it to tag articles with multiple categories. In general, it’s awesome.

The weirdness comes in with the specific tags that I am using.  For example, one article might be tagged “DHCP” as it refers to that protocol.  However, as soon as I created a “DHCPv6” tag, my Article.tagged_with("DHCP") stopped working.

I tracked it down to Line 161 which builds a list of tags like the one you are looking for, and if it’s a different length than your tag list, it returns a query condition that will always fail, thus preventing any results. Why does it do that?

The solution, was to specify :all => true in my Article.tagged_with call.

irb _

How have I missed this until now?  When in Ruby’s irb, you can use ‘_’ to reference the previous result of anything.


  >> 10 + 3
  => 13
  >> _ + 2
  => 15
  >> _ / 3
  => 5
  >>

Very useful.

A beautifully done screencast - or katacast as they are calling them - featuring some TDD with Ruby.  It is a fairly simple example, but executed perfectly.  Having the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto #3 as the soundtrack really adds to the drama.