Rails 1.2.4 Fixes Google Analytics Goal Conversions

The Rails core team released a small update to the 1.2 stable branch last week, 1.2.4, which fixes a few potential security problems and offers some minor enhancements.

If you plan to move your application to 2.0 when it’s released, the 1.2.4 update turns on some additional deprecation warnings that will help point out potential trouble in your existing code. Another useful resource for this is Mislav Marohnić’s compatibility checker script, though be forewarned that it may return false positives, since it’s just doing regular expression matches.

rake routes, previously available on edge, is included. This will show you all of your named routes, in match order, which makes debugging route-related issues much easier. (You can do this prior to 1.2.4, too, but that requires installing sake and the routes sake recipe.)

For me, though, by far the most welcome enhancement in the 1.2.4 update is something I’ve had to live with since starting to use Google Analytics: Analytics doesn’t know how to handle a semicolon in a goal URL. If you use RESTful routing and display a “thank you” page when a resource (say, an order) is successfully created, chances are high that you won’t be able to track this as a goal in Analytics. This is because custom actions for resources used a semicolon to separate the action from the rest of the path. 1.2.4, just like the coming 2.0, changes this to a regular slash, to avoid incompatibilities with software, such as Analytics, that mistake the semicolon as part of the query string.

If for some reason you want the old behavior, you’re in luck, as the choice of separator is now a class-level accessor on ActionController::Base:

ActionController::Base.resource_action_separator = ';'  # or whatever