Question

I have a YAML database with data in the following format:

- product:
  name: Apples

- product:
  name: Grapes

How can I update it so each product is assigned to a category, then on my page I can have an unordered list the products under a category heading?

For example:

Fruit
  *Apples
  *Grapes

Vegetables
  *Tomatoes
  *Broccoli

I tried searching for an example of something like this, but couldn’t find anything. Is it possible to do something like this?

- category:
  name: fruit

  - product:
    name: Apples

  - product:
    name: Grapes

- category:
  name: vegetables

  - product:
    name: Tomatoes

  - product:
    name: Broccoli  

Answer 1

I’d suggest two schemes, the first groups all products together:

products:
  - name: Apple
    type: Fruit

  - name: Grape
    type: Fruit

  - name: Tomato
    type: Vegetable

  - name: Brocoli
    type: Vegetable

The other scheme would be using on group for each type of product

fruits:
  - name: Apple

  - name: Grape

vegetable:
  - name: Tomato

  - name: Brocoli

To actually display this you would just load the yaml data with something like (forgive me if this has changed… it’s been a while since I used yaml):

require 'yaml'
data = YAML.load_file('data.yml')

data is essentially just a ruby hash so you can display whatever you like by traversing it.

EDIT:

If the second option is what you want. Try the following:

require 'yaml'

data = YAML.load_file('data.yml')
data.each do |category, products|
  puts "#{category}"
  products.each do |product|
    puts "\t#{products}"
  end
end

Output should be:

fruits
     Apple
     Grape
vegetable
     Tomato
     Brocoli

If you want to output html, then modify it to something like:

require 'yaml'

data = YAML.load_file('data.yml')
data.each do |category, products|
  puts "#{category}"
  puts "<ul>"
  products.each do |product|
    puts "<li>#{products}</li>"
  end
  puts "</ul>"
end

You can see the differences to add the html formatting is very simple and you should be able to further modify this to your needs.