Question

New to Ruby and Rails.

I am developing a simple app for where you can register teams, players etc and it looks like this:

Team has_many Players
Players belongs_to Team

When I want to show the player in view(normal users):

<%= @player.name %> - <%= playerteam %>

and in the admin view it looks like this:

<% @players.each do |player| %>
    <tr>        
        <td><%= player.id %></td>   
        <td><%= player.name %></td>
        <td><%= playerteam(player) %></td>
        <td><%= owner(player) %></td>               
    </tr>
<% end %>

and the helper method:

def playerteam(player = nil)      
  if player != nil
    if player.team_id == nil
      return "No team"
    else
      @team = Team.find(player.team_id)
      return @team.name
    end
  else              
    if @player.team_id == nil
      return "No team"      
    else
      @team = Team.find(@player.team_id)
      return @team.name
     end
  end
end

It works but it is not pretty or “Ruby Sexy”

At first it was only used from the normal view but then when I wanted to use it from the admin-view also I had to add the parameter with a default value and the extra if-clause.

Are there a better way?

Answer 1

I wouldn’t use a helper method at all. Helper Methods shouldn’t be used to retrieve model data. That’s what’s the model is for.

you can do something like this:

normal users:

<%= @player.name %> - <%= player.team ? player.team.name : 'No Team' %>

admin:

<% @players.each do |player| %>
    <tr>        
        <td><%= player.id %></td>   
        <td><%= player.name %></td>
        <td><%= player.team ? player.team.name : 'No Team' %></td>
        <td><%= owner(player) %></td>               
    </tr>
<% end %>

You could probably do something similar with the owner-helper

to avoid the ? :-if-else syntax in every view you can add this to your player model

class Player < ActiveRecord::Base
  def team_name
    team ? team.name : "No Team"
  end
end

Then you views look like this:

normal users:

<%= @player.name %> - <%= @player.team_name %>

admin:

<% @players.each do |player| %>
    <tr>        
        <td><%= player.id %></td>   
        <td><%= player.name %></td>
        <td><%= player.team_name %></td>
        <td><%= owner(player) %></td>               
    </tr>
<% end %>

IMHO: This would be much more “Rails Sexy” 😉