Question

Is there a way to make this situation more compact in rails views?

Eg I have haml

= object.count unless object.count ==0

I sort of don’t like that has I’m repeating the function there, I would much rather have something like

= object.count unless ==0

Eg if I had more complex statements

= object.relations.where(attribute: "something").count unless zero?

I could split that into two lines say

- cnt = object.relations.where(attribute: "something").count
= cnt unless cnt==0

But for each situation I would have multiple lines, and storing a variable to use once sucks.

EDIT: just to elaborate I want to check if the number is 0, and if so not display anything. It looks nicer in the view that way.

UPDATE:

One of the answers made come up with a solution along these lines

class Object
  def unless
    self unless yield(self)
  end
end

So I can call whatever object I have with a block eg. .unless{|c| c<1}

This lets me tack the conditionals on, and keeps it pretty clear what is going on :), bonus is as it’s block driven I can use this on any object :P.

Thanks everyone 🙂

UPDATE EVEN MORE

Having |c| in the block sucked. So I looked up the api and changed it too

class Object
  def unless(&block)
    self unless instance_eval(&block)
  end
end

So now I can use .count.unless{zero?} to accomplish this :P. Or if I have a complicated condition I can add that in with |c| etc.

Answer 1

If this is only about count, you can monkey patch Enumerable:

module Enumerable
  def count_or_empty_string
    self.any? ? self.count : ''
  end
end

If object is an enumerable, you can do this:

= object.count_or_empty_string

This will return an "" if object.count == 0 else it will return an integer. So there is no need for unless or if in your HAML anymore.