Question

I have this function in module MessagesHelper:

def message_block( message, ticket, comment )
  content_tag( :div, :class => "message", :id => "message-" + message.id.to_s ) do
    content_tag( :p, message.body, :class => "message-body", :id => "message-body-" + message.id.to_s ) +

    content_tag( :div,  content_tag( :a, "add comment", :id => "comment-link-" + ticket.id.to_s, :class => "comment-link" ), :id => "comment-" + ticket.id.to_s, :class => "comment" ) +

    form_for( comment, :html => { :class => "add-comment", :id => "add-comment-" + ticket.id.to_s } ) do |f|
      f.label :body, "add comment"
      f.text_area :body
      f.submit "add comment"
    end
  end
end

To get this expected outcome:

<div class="message">
  <p></p>
  <div class="comment">
  </div>
  <form class="add-comment">
  </form>
</div>

In my partial view, _messages.html.erb:

<% if !@message.nil? %>
  <% @message.each do |m| %>
  <%= message_block( m, @ticket, @comment ) %>
<% end %>

The text_area does not even load in the DOM and I can only see the add comment button. This is all in the TicketController (not MessageController or CommentController).

Any help with my problem would be great. Thank you.

Answer 1

You’ve got a quite hard to read and maintain helper. I would suggest you to consider usage of partial for it.

Here’s the example. Let’s say you want to render a lot of forms and you consider to create a helper which accepts some header, object for form and list of fields to be included in the form. Here the solution via partials.

Create in your views/shared/_render_some_stuff.erb (note the underscore at the beginning):

<%= title %>
<%= form_for object do |f| %>
    <% fields.each do |field_name| %>
        <%= f.label field_name %>
        <%= f.text_field field_name %>
    <% end %>
<% end %>

And “inject” it in any view this way:

<%= render 'shared/render_some_stuff', 
            title: 'Hello', object: Product.first, fields: [:title, :price] %>

(Note: here no underscore at the beginning. You just need it to distinguish your partial in a directory, but not here)

I guess it beats your approach?