defining custom functions to use in views

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all, I am new to rails, so please forget this newbie question.. I would like to add a function for calculating the elapsed time from the date of a post and the moment when the page is retrieved (Yes, I am sure 1milion of people did it already..) Considering that it should only process the data retrieved trough the model and controller, I would prefer to implement it as a simple utility function and not as a method of the controller. So, the question is: is there a proper way to add simple functions and have them accessible within the .rhtml templates scope?

Thanks, Andrea

2

Hemm... I just discovered the existence of the app/helpers folder and it seems it does what I was looking for...

:wink:

3

You might look at Rails' time_ago_in_words (also known as
distance_of_time_in_words_to_now).

Assuming you have a created_at field in your Post model, you can do:

This was posted <%= time_ago_in_words(@post.created_at) %> ago.