Question

I think I’m having a brain freeze here but I cannot figure out the best way to do this… Thanks in advance for the help.

I have a some fields in my location table are updated by an external script every 5 minutes. If they’re not updated for more than 1 hour, an email will be sent out to the site admins.

That was reasonably straightforward getting a list of dead locations:

 scope :not_responding, lambda {
    where('last_heartbeat < ?', Time.now - 1.hour )
  }

What I’m stuck on should be very simple…. All I want to do is change the styling of the location name so it’s red if it’s not responding.

%td
  - @locations.each do |locations|    
    = if ('locations.last_heartbeat < ?', Time.now - 1.hour )  
      red
    -else
      green

But that throws an error (unexpected ‘,’)

Can anyone suggest how to move this into my model??

— UPDATED —

I’m not sure if this is a bug or what but I’m seeing some bizarre results.

Using answer below, I’ve added this:

def not_responding?
    last_heartbeat < (Time.now - 1.hour)
  end

And call using:

- if location.not_responding?
  red
- else
  green

However, this gave me an error about ‘<‘ being undefined.

In the end, I had to do this to get it to work. All seems ridiculous….

 def not_responding
   last_heartbeat <=> (Time.now - 1.hour)
 end

And in the view:

- if (hotspot.not_responding_two == -1)
  red
- else
  green

Does not make sense as the follow test was ok:

def test?
  Time.now > (Time.now - 1.hour)
end

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way would be something like this:

class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
  def not_responding?
    last_heartbeat < (Time.now - 1.hour)
  end
end

I threw in a question mark because this is a Boolean method. And in your view:

%td
  - @locations.each do |location|    
    -if location.not_responding?
      red
    -else
      green

You need to call a method on the location object, and in this case you’re calling the one we just defined, which will return true or false depending on when the last heartbeat was.