Newbie question regarding where to put logic for UI elements

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello folks.

I am building a site that let's users track their progress on 30 day challenges. To record their progress, users make a Post for each day of the challenge. The Post object has a "complete" attribute to record if they were successful on that particular day. When users view a challenge, I build a UI element that both let's users navigate to daily Posts, and get a snapshot of the challenger's progress. It looks a little like this ...

[10/11] [10/12] [10/13] ... * 30 days, with different colored boxes

There are five types of buttons, with factors such as today's date, the presence of posts, the success of posts, etc.

1. This day has a post, and the user was successful. This button is GREEN, and has a link to view the post. 2. This day has a post, and the user was unsuccessful. This button is RED, and has a link to view the post 3. This day is after today, so no posting is possible. This button is GREY, and has NO link. 4. This day is post-able, but there is no post. This button is WHITE. 5. This day is post-able, and the logged in user owns the challenge. This button is YELLOW, and has a link to create a new post.

Tests with users have shown that this is one of their favorite parts of the app, so it needs to stay.

I think I am approaching this incorrectly. Right now, I am building an array of arrays in the controller ... 1 item for each of the 30 days in the nav. Each item is an array with data for the view ... [date,type,post id,border type]. I pass this to the view using an instance variable @thirtydays, and then use more logic on the View end (e.g. "if boxtype == 3") to decide how to display the button.

Something seems fishy about this to me but I am not skilled enough to know why. What is the 'correct' way to supply data for UI elements with lots of logic? Should I keep this all in the View? Should I create a method under the Challenger class that takes a number (1-30), and spits information for that particular day, and iterate from 1-30 in the View to create the buttons?

Thanks in advanced.

Confused Newbie

John

2

I think you're close... Instead of an array of arrays, I would replace each 'inner array' with a full-fledged object.

Add a file called (for example) day_indicator.rb in your /lib folder. As long as you name the class correctly, Rails will find it automatically for you:

class DayIndicator

  attr_accessor :date, :type, :post id, :border_type

end

Now in your controller, just create an instance of each of these as needed and add it to your array. In your view, each item in the array is a DayIndicator object so you can easily access the attributes.

Plus, you can continue to add logic to DayIndicator as needed, and it will be encapsulated away from the view.

How does that sound?

Jeff www.essentialrails.com - 2-Day workshop on Rails for beginners. Chicago. Sept 21-22, 2007. www.softiesonrails.com - blog