Question

Does Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails (Third Edition) teach best practices as well as Rails coding?

My concern is that, as I use this book, I’m developing bad Rails coding habits resulting from the rather basic nature of the examples used in the book. Case-in-point:

The Product Model:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.find_products_for_sale
  find(:all, :order => "title" )
end

The Store Controller

class StoreController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @products = Product.find_products_for_sale
  end
end

The Store Index View

<h1>Your Pragmatic Catalog</h1>
<% @products.each do |product| -%>
  <div class="entry">
  <%= image_tag(product.image_url) %>
  <h3><%=h product.title %></h3>
  <%= product.description %>
  <div class="price-line">
  <span class="price"><%= product.price %></span>
  </div>
  </div>
<% end %>

Is it a best practice to declare a ‘helper’ function of sorts just to pull in all the available products in the catalog? Shouldn’t they have just done this?

@products = Products.find(:all, :order => "title");

I understand that they were probably just trying to demonstrate class-level methods, but they don’t add any caveat in the code stating that this isn’t really how you’re supposed to do this.

Answer 1

I think in this particular you could have done that.

But sometimes when doing complex finds, its better to abstract into a custom find statement. Applying model specific business rules etc, should be done inside the model instead of the controller. So its not exactly a bad idea.

You can even use named_scopes to do the similar things. check out for this for more

http://railscasts.com/episodes/108-named-scope