Question

I have a Rails Table, called Sales, that I would like to render in a sequence of HTML tables on a single HTML page.

The Sales Table contains a list of sales transactions made by SalesPeople (salesperson_id is a field within each Sales record), and I would like to list each of their Sales records grouped in HTML tables, by salesperson_id. Similar to this:

Sales Person : Bob

*PRODUCT*    *QUANTITY*
Widgets       17
Cogs           5
Screws       100

Sales Person : Jim

*PRODUCT*    *QUANTITY*
Bozzles       49
Widgets       20
Screws       250
Flurbs        22

Now, my first thoughts were that I would ‘find_all’ sales transactions meeting my criteria, and then loop through the returned array, and rendering each SalesPerson using a _partial, but I’m aware I can only perform one render per result.

Is it possible to achieve this using a single render, do I need some HTML / JavaScript magic, or is there another solution?

Thanks.

Answer 1

OK, I figured out a way to achieve what I want to achieve by using group_by, with help from this RailsCast,

http://railscasts.com/episodes/29-group-by-month (#29 of a brilliant series)

So, I use group_by to group the sales by salesperson_id, then in my view,

<% @groupedSales.each do |salesperson_id, sales| %>
   <h2><%= Salesperson.find(salesperson_id).name %></h2>
   <table>
     <thead>
       <tr>
         <th>Date</th>
         <th>Product</th>
         <th>Quantity</th>
       </tr>
     </thead>
     <tbody>
       <% sales.each do |sales_activity| %>
         <tr>
           <td><%= sales_activity.created_at.strftime('%d/%m/%y') %></td>
           <td><%= sales_activity.product %></td>
           <td><%= sales_activity.quantity %></td>
         </tr>
       <% end %>
    </tbody>
  </table>
<% end %>