jens t

Hey! I ran into the same problem a while back — working with EDI files in Rails isn’t super straightforward since it’s a pretty niche format and Rails doesn’t have built-in support for it. After a lot of digging, the best approach I found was using the Ruby gem called stupidedi. It’s not super beginner-friendly, but it does a solid job at parsing standard EDI formats like X12 and EDIFACT.

You’ll need to install the gem and configure it for the specific EDI version you’re working with (like 4010 or 5010). It basically builds a parser "machine" that reads the EDI file and lets you walk through each segment. Writing EDI is a bit more manual — you either construct segments using the gem or just generate the EDI string manually if you know the format. If your use case is really complex, you might even consider using a third-party service or API that handles the EDI parsing and just integrates with your Rails app. Let me know what kind of EDI file you’re dealing with (like 850, 810, etc.) and I can try to give more specific help!

Here’s a forum-style response in a friendly and knowledgeable tone, addressing "Meta Tags from Scratch with Current Attributes, ActiveModel & render_in Discussion" — assuming the topic is about Ruby on Rails view components or helpers:

Great topic! Building meta tags from scratch using render_in and ActiveModel can be a really clean and flexible way to handle SEO in Rails apps today. Using render_in from ViewComponent (or custom component-style helpers), you can easily encapsulate your meta tag logic and pass dynamic content using ActiveModel-like objects. For example, creating a MetaTagComponent that takes in a page object (with attributes like title, description, image, etc.) makes your views much cleaner and easier to test. Plus, you can include defaults, fallbacks, and even localized strings right in the component. It's also nice to decouple meta logic from controllers this way. If anyone's using this pattern, I’d love to hear how you're managing conditional tags (like Open Graph or Twitter Cards) and what conventions you're following for attribute names.