Helper versus Partial

rubyonrails-talk
1

hi all,

Im looking for some pointers on best practices of when to use a helper and when to use a partial.

2

first, helpers...

for instance, i need to be able to display a sentence such as

"There are X things in your queue"

where X is an integer

now, depending on the number of things, the grammar will be different. if there is only 1 thing, I need it to say "There is 1 thing...", with 2 or more, it needs to read "There are 2 things..." and with 0 things, "There is nothing..."

now i could put all the code to handle this in my template, but that would be ugly (and not DRY), or i could but in a helper and just call the helper when I need to display that sentence correctly

def queue_title(things = 0)   title = "There "   case things     when 0       title += "is nothing"     when 1       title += "is 1 thing"     else       title += "are #{things} things"   end   title += " in your queue"   title end

then in my view template

<%= title_for_queue(@things.size) ->

now a partial is a chunk of your view template that you want to either reuse or use repeatedly. candiates for partials are table rows, list items, forms, etc.

so say i have a form that i want to use a few different views, i would put it into a partial

_my_form.rhtml

<form ...> ... </form>

and wherever i want to show this form i can call

<%= render :partial => "my_form" -%>

i suggest you also read the rails docs on helpers and partials.

hope this helps

Chris

3

My rule of thumb is that if the rhtml is way to full of ERb <% %> tags, I'll make a helper instead.