Question

I am writing an imageboard in Ruby on Rails.

I have a form for creating new posts. In that form, there is logic to figure out whether the post was created from board#show or topic#show and act accordingly. It is:

  <% if @board != nil %>
    <%= f.hidden_field :board_id, :value => @board.id %>
  <% end %>

  <% if @topic != nil %>
    <%= f.hidden_field :topic_id, :value => @topic.id %>
  <% end %>

The form is rendered on board#show and topic#show with this piece of code:

<%= render :partial => 'posts/form'%>

Should I move that logic to the controller? How would I go about doing that?

Answer 1

As it is, in the view, it’s probably fine. However, you could (possibly, depending on your app) refine it a little by putting the board/topic information in the URL using nested routes. Routes that would look something like this:

/boards/4/posts
/topics/133/posts

Then your “is it from a board or a post” logic could happen in your PostsController. Again, whether or not this is ‘better’ is dependent on your requirements, but that’s an alternative way of approaching this.

As a side note, you can slim down your conditionals a little. if @board is the same as if @board != nil (unless you have a special case for @board being false. nil and false will both evaluate as false).