Question

So I’m mapping an object’s attributes to a table within a view and I wanted to make the code a little more succinct and eliminate redundant HTML.

Here’s what it looks like:

- @users.each do |user|
   %tr
     %td= user.username
     %td= user.first_name
     %td= user.last_name
     %td= user.email
     %td= user.country
     %td= user.state
     %td= user.password 
      ...

I was wondering if there was a good way to eliminate all of those redundant %td= user. calls. I was watching the Railscast episode on Form Builders and he had a helper method that uses the following meta-programming syntax to eliminate repeats:

%w[text_field text_area password_field collection_select].each do |method_name|
    define_method(method_name) do |name, *args|

Now is there any way I can use something similar to this structure? I actually tried to implement this exact syntax structure after replacing the method names and it seems that the define_method function was undefined (oh the irony!).

Answer 1

Use .send to invoke a method dynamically:

- %w(username first_name last_name ...).each do |method|
  %td= user.send(method)