Question

I have a controller with a lot of code duplication such as:

class PostController < ApplicationController
  def action1
  end

  ...

  def actionN
  end
end

And basically each action do something like this:

def action
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  if @post.action(current_user)
    flash[:notice] = "#{custom string for this action}"
  else
    flash[:notice] = "Problem with your request"
  end
  redirect_to root_url
end

I thought about a method in ApplicationController that takes an array of symbols and generate the other methods, such as:

def self.action_for(*args)
   args.each do |method, string|
     define_method method.to_sym do
        @post = Post.find(params[:id])
        if @post.send method.to_sym
          flash[:notice] = string
        else
          flash[:notice] = "Problem with your request"
        end
        redirect_to root_url
     end
   end
end

And call in PostController:

action_for [:action1, "Congratulations!"], [:action2, "Cool action!"] ..

I think this solution is ugly, it makes the ApplicationController dirty and allow other controllers to call my actions.

Any idea to solve the code-duplication problem?

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s anything too ugly in this solution.

To limit the logic to one controller, you can define self.action_for in PostController, instead of ApplicationController, and call it below its definition.

Note that you’re already passing in first elements in pairs as symbols, so to_sym calls in action_for are not necessary.