Question

I have created a table in my Ruby on Rails application that I am building called Tags. It is a blog application so I allow the user to associate tags with a post and do this through a :posts, :has_many => tags and Tag belongs_to :post association.

Now that I have my Tags table I am trying to see how I would render the view such that it displays the tag and tag count. (it should be noted that I am trying to render this in the /views/posts/index.html.erb file).

For instance, if there are 10 entries in the Tag table for tag_name Sports. How can I display Sports (10) in the view. I am not looking to do this for a specific tag but rather, somehow search the table, combine like tags and display a list of all tags with counts next to them. (I really want these to be a link to a list of posts that contain that tag but I learned early on only to ask one question at a time).

Hope that makes sense.

UPDATE FOR COMMENTS

view

<% @tag_counts.each do |tag_name, tag_count| %>
    <tr>
      <td><%= link_to(tag_name, posts_path(:tag_name => tag_name)) %> </td>
      <td>(<%=tag_count%>)</td>
    </tr>
<% end %>

postsController:

def index
    @tag_counts = Tag.count(:group => :tag_name)
    @posts = Post.all :order => "created_at DESC"



    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.xml  { render :xml => @posts }
      format.json { render :json => @posts }
      format.atom
    end
  end

Answer 1

Do the following:

Tag.count(:group => :name).each do |tag_name, tag_count|
  puts "tag_name=#{tag_name}, tag_count=#{tag_count}"
end

You might improve the performance if you add an index on thename column in the tags table.

To display the posts associated with a tag name do the following:

In the controller method set the count hash:

Set @tag_counts in the controller action associated with the view displaying the tag names.

@tag_counts = Tag.count(:group => :tag_name)

In the view show each tag as a link:

<% @tag_counts.each do |tag_name, tag_count| %>
  <%= link_to(tag_name, posts_path(:tag_name => tag_name)) %> (<%=tag_count%>)
<% end %>

The link points to the index method of your PostsController. Each link has a tag_name parameter.

In the index method of PostsController:

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @tag_counts = Tag.count(:group => :tag_name)
    conditions, joins = {}, nil
    unless (params[:tag_name] || "").empty?
      conditions = ["tags.tag_name = ? ", params[:tag_name]]
      joins = :tags
    end
    @posts=Post.all(:joins => joins, :conditions => conditions)
  end
end

Edit
Updated the code to change the name field to tag_name.