Question

So I’ve got an object in my database with a date field, except sometimes it will be nil. Is there a way in the view I can show this as a string value. Something like TBA maybe?

Answer 1

<%= @event.date || "TBA" %> should do it.

In response to your comments, yes, you could do this in the model but it’s a bad idea. Why?

First of all, it is about presentation of the data so for that reason it belongs in the view.

Secondly, it could break things. If you did it in the model, @event.date would sometimes return a date and sometimes a string. What would happen if you called @event.date.hour and date was "TBA"? You’d get an error. The only fix would be to check for it everywhere, which would be horrible.

If you really are going to be doing it a lot you could create a helper method in application_helper.rb that could look something like this:

def date_or_tba(date)
  date || "TBA"
end

So you could then write in your view:

<%= date_or_tba @event.date %>

Which isn’t much less typing but would have the not inconsiderable advantage of restricting the use of the string “TBA” to only one place – which means if you ever need to change it (for I18n purposes for example) – it’s really easy.