Question

I have a pretty basic blog app on rails, and I need help creating a method.

For each post, the user has to specify a neighborhood, and for styling purposes, I want to find out if that neighborhood falls in a certain bucket so I can color that post accordingly. For instance, the neighborhood “SOMA” is a part of the bucket “Downtown.”

I imagined that what I would do is pass the neighborhood into a method that determines which bucket it falls in and I can somehow output the bucket to correspond to a div class in the index. Open to other suggestions.

Does anyone know where a method like this would live?

Update:

I added a barebones method in PostsHelper to even see if it works, then i can flesh out the logic

module PostsHelper

def bucket(neighbor)
    case neighbor
        when "SOMA"
        puts "Downtown"

        when "Mission"
        puts "Dolores"

        else
        puts "foo"
    end

end

end

Then I tried calling the method in the post index and nothing happens. This may be the dumbest question ever, but what am I missing? Is this even the right way to go about it?:

<ul id="post-list">
<% @posts.each do |post| %>

<li><%= post.content %></li>
<li><%= post.attribution %> in <%= post.neighborhood %> 
<span class="post-date"><%=time_ago_in_words(post.created_at) %> ago</span></li>
<li> <%= bucket(yield(post.neighborhood)) %> </li> 

<% end %>
</ul>

Answer 1

This kind of methods should live in a decorator.

See this railscast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/286-draper

---

Edit after your details

def bucket(neighbor)
  case neighbor
  when "SOMA"    then "Downtown"
  when "Mission" then "Dolores"
  else
    "foo"
  end
end

In your view:

<li> <%= bucket(post.neighborhood) %> </li>

But you should really consider using decorators.