Question

I’m very new to RoR, moving from PHP. I have what I hope is a simple question.

Say I have a Model called Article, stored in the table articles.

If I want to display a list of articles on several pages in my site, I might have some simple markup such as;

<% Article.find_each do |article| %>
    <div class="article_list_wrapper">
        <h1><%= article.title %></h1>
        <p><%= article.body %></p>
    </div>
<% end %>

Where would I put this markup? I mean in what file; if I put it in a view, then I will have to copy it if I want a similar list in a different part of the site.

Putting it in the Model itself seems intuitive to me, the Article object should know how to render itself, right? But that seems totally against the CMV idea.

And what if I wanted to have several ways of rendering the same object? Like a list view, a full page view etc.

Many thanks, just trying to get into the correct habits from the start.

Answer 1

You would put that portion of HTML markup into what is known as a partial — something that can be rendered as a small piece of a larger layout. You’re right, you wouldn’t want to store the format in the model, because you might wish to render that specific HTML for web browsers and render very similar XML or JSON for clients using an API and render some other very similar content into ASN.1 or YAML for further other clients. The “view” really should stay associated with the views.

With this specific example, you would probably go one further and provide the articles to render via a variable rather than letting the view find the articles itself:

Controller:

def flubber:
    @articles = Article.find_each(some_criteria)
end

View:

<div class="article_list_wrapper">
    <%= render :partial => "article_list", :collection => @articles %>
</div>

And then provide a View for the corresponding controller with the name _article_list:

    <h1><%= article.title %></h1>
    <p><%= article.body %></p>

If the <div class="..."> is going to be identical in every single use of this partial, you could either pass a :template to the partial, or put it into a view helper, or put the entire render with the :template argument in a view helper. (Either the first or last approach here is what I’d do — the <div class="..."> doesn’t seem so important to require its own file, but if it were more complicated, it might — and then I wouldn’t want to give the partial :layout argument every time I needed it.)