A client of mine let me know today that the Excel spreadsheets I was generating for them had data truncated at 255 characters. I didn’t find anything on the web that gave a reason or offered a fix so I decided to dig into the code myself. I am using the Ruby Spreadsheet-Excel gem.

Sure enough, on line 289, of workbook.rb (v0.3.5.1), there was this:

      # Truncate strings over 255 characters
      if strlen > StrMax
         str    = str[0..StrMax-1]
         length = 0x0008 + StrMax
         strlen = StrMax
      end

No idea why this was done and I wasn’t going to waste anytime considering the downsides of not truncating, so I commented this block out and it works fine.

Maybe it has something to do with an older version of Excel? Who knows.

I just solved an issue that I couldn’t find an answer for on the web, so I thought I’d just put it out there so that maybe it could help someone else. I am creating a simple CMS tool for one of my clients and always like to use the FCKEditor for CMS tools. I hadn’t built such a thing in Rails before, nor had I used ActiveScaffold before today. But Rails + ActiveScaffold + FCKEditor seemed like the perfect combination. And it is, once you get it working. Here’s what I had to do to make this work for a table called content_items and a field called content.

After installing the FCKEditor and ActiveScaffold plugins, I created, for the content column, a form column override file in my views/content_items directory called _content_form_column.rhtml. After some trial and error, I landed at this solution:

<%=column.name.to_s.titleize %>:

<%= fckeditor_textarea( :record, column.name, :toolbarSet => 'Simple', :width => '100%', :height => '400px') %>

<input name="commit" type="submit" value="Save" class="submit"
	onClick="var oEditor = FCKeditorAPI.GetInstance('record_<%=@record.id%>_<%=column.name%>_editor');
        document.getElementById('record_<%=@record.id%>_<%=column.name%>_editor').value = oEditor.GetXHTML();" />

Now, this is my 15-minute solution. What I’d like to do is get that onClick JavaScript to fire on the form’s onSubmit event and remove this secondary submit button altogether. But, since it’s late, I decided to remove the ActiveScaffold Update button and make this column the last on the page. How’s that for an I’ll-deal-with-it-later hack!?