This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: Hash for views Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

One of my team members asked for a way to use non ActiveRecord objects in views. We settled on a modified hash that will have accessors for all the keys. Pretty simple with method_missing()

class ObjectiveHash < Hash

  def method_missing(method_id, *args, &block)
    begin
      super
    rescue NoMethodError => e
      is_assign = method_id.to_s[-1,1] == '='
      the_key = (method_id.to_s[0..(is_assign ? -2 : -1)]).to_sym
      self[the_key] = args if args && is_assign
      raise e if !self[the_key] 
      return self[the_key]
    end
  end

  private 
  def initialize other_hash
    super
    update(other_hash)
  end

end

Now we can pass it to the view, and retireve into it on submit:

# Setting values
@settings = ObjectiveHash.new
@settings.name = "John"
@settings.family = "Doe"

# Getting values on submit
@settings = ObjectiveHash.new params[:settings].symbolize_keys

# Accessing the values
@settings.name # => John
@settings.family # => Doe

Please note that it'll be slower than regular hash access (which still works), and that all keys are symbols.