I my application has to be all the "recent news, recent users, recent
pictures"-stuff. This is shown in a rendered view. Right now I'm using a
site controller getting data from different models like
Of course that doesn't work anymore calling different contollers. I
thought about setting a global variable? I tried to put it in
apllication_helper but I get a nil-error by writing
def index
@title ="Willkommen"
@news = Article.find(:all, :limit => 3, :order => 'created_at DESC')
$news = @news
end
Right now I don't know what happens with the variable at all. Looks like
that way, any controller, even called straight from a different site
will participate from the variable called and set by any user.
Every time a user calls the site-controller (well and it's the
index-site) the variable will be updated.
This doesn't seem like the best way to use a global variable. If you are
doing something like displaying those 3 articles on lots of pages, then
maybe you want something like this in application.rb:
before_filter :get_recent_articles
def get_recent_articles
@articles = Article.recent
end
Then you will be able to access @articles in every view (with <%
articles.each do |article| %> etc). And you will have access to
@articles in all your controller actions.
You won't have access to @articles in your models though. But there you
could just call Article.recent.
Note: the above code uses a named scope like this (in article.rb)
named_scope :recent, :limit => 3, :order => 'created_at DESC'
What I'm suggesting doesn't sound perfect to me (I'm just writing this
quickly). But I think it is a better way to organize it than I global
variable.
I have always like constants for "global" variables. It comes from
programming C I think. Having model related constants in your
controllers is really not the MVC way IMHO. A constant is easy to
setup in ActiveRecord and in my opinion are much more readable. And
guess what, I actually did it with an Article model too! =>
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
...
ARTS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?',
'arts%']).id
OPINE_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'opine%']).id
DISTRACTIONS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'distra%']).id
NEWS_POLITICS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'news%']).id
...
So in my controllers I use a method like this (the actual method is a
shared method for all "types" longer, this is for readability:
...
def arts_archive
Article.find_by_category_id(Article::ARTS_CATEGORY)
end
...
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
...
ARTS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?',
'arts%']).id
OPINE_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'opine%']).id
DISTRACTIONS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'distra%']).id
NEWS_POLITICS_CATEGORY = Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name
LIKE ?', 'news%']).id
...
So in my controllers I use a method like this (the actual method is a
shared method for all "types" longer, this is for readability:
...
def arts_archive
Article.find_by_category_id(Article::ARTS_CATEGORY)
end
...
I think a better way to do this is
class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :articles #or has_one :article
def self.arts
# You could probably also do this with a named scope,
# but I don't remember the syntax off the top of my
# for selecting just one object.
Category.find(:first, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?', 'arts%']).id
end
end
and then in your controller:
Category.arts.articles