Question

I will try to explain this in a different way so it makes more sense. In my system there are courses which are made up of steps. There are many types of steps: Video, Quiz, Text, Survey…etc. Each of these steps share common data such as title, summary, client, and position. But each step has a completely different model for its data. A quiz step has many different tables and fields where a Text step, really just has one extra field. Therefore I don’t think Single Table inheritance works.

But the problem comes when I want to view all the steps at once and display and edit link.

Since I have different controller for each step type, I don’t want to do something like this in my controller:

if @step.type=="Quiz"
   edit_step_quiz_path(@step.getSpecificStepObject())
elsif @step.type == "Text"
   edit_step_text_path(@step.getSpecificStepObject())
elsif @step.type=="Video"
   edit_step_video_path(@step.getSpecificStepObject())
end

Should I instead have my main “step” controller’s edit method do the logic and redirect to the appropriate location for editing so my view is clean?

Answer 1

I’m assuming you meant that you are considering putting that code in your view, not your controller. I would define a helper method:

def edit_step_path(step)
  send("edit_step_#{step.type.downcase}_path".to_sym, step.getSpecificStepObject)
end

Then you can just call edit_step_path(@step)