Tag Archives: JavaScript

Getting CSRF to work with Rails and Angular

I had trouble posting to my Rails server from an Angular controller until I found this SO post. In /app/controllers/application_controller.rb I added the following code.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  after_action :set_csrf_cookie_for_ng

  def set_csrf_cookie_for_ng
    cookies['XSRF-TOKEN'] = form_authenticity_token if protect_against_forgery?
  end

  protected

    # In Rails 4.2 and above
    def verified_request?
      super || valid_authenticity_token?(session, request.headers['X-XSRF-TOKEN'])
    end
end

Direct and Delegated Event Handlers in jQuery

An alternate title might be: how to bind event handlers to new, or dynamically generated, table rows. When using jQuery, we attach sets of instructions to different parts of an HTML document using selectors. Suppose you wanted to attach some functionality to some text in a table, for example, when you click on a row in a table, it brings up a new table below the first table. This is actually kind of tricky, it turns out that there is a distinction between direct and delegated event handlers.

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Handle EADDRINUSE Error in Node

When a node application crashes unexpectedly, you might get a EADDRINUSE, Address already in use error when you try to restart it. This means that the port you’re using is already being used by the crashed application. What you need to do is fun the PID of that process, and then kill it. There’s more than one way to skin that cat, but I like to use netstat. N.B. You’ll need to run this as sudo for it to work.

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Open a Text File with Angular

I had some trouble this weekend figuring out how to open a text file in Angular. My luck turned around when I found this StackOverflow question. The question addressed loading an image, but I was able to fiddle with this Plunker example until I was able to load text files. (Basically, I replaced every instance of “readAsDataURL” in the upload.js file with “readAsText”.)

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How to Import Your Own Modules in Node

In order to create your own modules in Node, you attach your own classes or functions to an exports or module.exports object. Then you can access those items in the required module. Suppose we have a file named classes.js. If we wanted to import the ClassX and ClassY classes from that module, then we would add the following lines at the end of the classes.js file:

module.exports.ClassX = ClassX ;
module.exports.ClassY = ClassY ;

Then, in another file we would access these classes as:

var classes = require("./classes.js") ;
var ClassX = classes.ClassX ;
var ClassY = classes.ClassY ;

Preserve JS Object Methods Over HTTP via JSON

I had the problem this week of sending Javascript objects over HTTP; although you can easily send objects using JSON, you cannot transmit the object methods. I had intended to build a data structure on the server, send it over to the client where different attributes would be changed, and then send the object back to the server where I had hoped to use the object methods, except the methods did not exist any longer.

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Coordinate Reference System Transformations in Javascript

Yes, you can do coordinate reference system transformations in Javascript. (I know, I’m shocked also.) I found proj4js on GitHub, which is a port of an older project, PROJ.4. The proj4js library is very easy to use. All you need to do is find the specification strings at spatialrerefence.org of the two projections/datums you are interested in and you’re ready to go.

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General Tree Data Structure in Javascript

In this post I’ll provide some code for a general tree data structure in Javascript. I found a lot of packages on npm that provided binary trees, red-black trees, and tries [sic], but nothing that provided a general tree data structure. As with most implementations of data structures that I’ve seen, this implementation defines a Node object, and the large scale structure that we’re interested in, a Tree object. The Node object knows about other Node objects, specifically it’s parent and children. The Tree object is responsible for connecting these nodes in a tree structure. We could use a very, very similar Node object to build a different kind of tree, or a linked list, or a stack, or whatever.

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Using Node and Mongo to Collect Data from Reddit

I am taking a course on MongoDB development with Node.js from Mongo University. In the second week we covered a thing that I thought was very interesting. They walked you through how to grab the JSON data out of a Reddit page. Reddit apparently offers its data up as a JSON if you pass it a .json path. Here is the coffeescript that produces the code provided in the development course.

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