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I'm Thinking of Putting View Logic into a Model

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Jake Scruggs

Posts: 336
Nickname: aurorae314
Registered: Feb, 2008

Jake Scruggs is a developer at ThoughtWorks

I'm Thinking of Putting View Logic into a Model

Posted: Aug 24, 2008 8:54 PM

This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jake Scruggs.
Original Post: I'm Thinking of Putting View Logic into a Model Feed Title: Jake Scruggs Feed URL: http://jakescruggs.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default Feed Description: Ruby, Rails, Metrics, Testing, and pursuit of clean code.	Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jake Scruggs Latest Posts From Jake Scruggs

As I am clearly crazy, but hear me out. Say there's a Car object that uses single table inheritance and all the objects that descended from it are routed through the car method in the CarController. The CarController looks like this:

class CarController < ApplicationController
  def car
    layout = nil
    @scripts = []
    @stylesheets = []
    @car = Car.find(params[:id])
    if @car.is_a?(Toyota)
      layout = 'two_column'
      @stylesheets << 'two_column_layout.css'
      @stylesheets << 'two_column_theme.css'
    elsif @car.is_a?(Hyundai)
      layout = 'three_column'
      @stylesheets << 'three_column_layout.css'
      @stylesheets << 'three_column_theme.css'
      @stylesheets << 'hyundai_theme.css'
      @scripts << 'discount.js'
    elsif @car.is_a?(Ford)
      layout = 'ford'
      @stylesheets << 'ford_layout.css' 
      @stylesheets << 'ford_theme.css'
      @scripts << 'discount.js'
    elsif @car.is_a?(Saturn)
      layout = 'two_column'
      @stylesheets << 'two_column_layout.css'
      @stylesheets << 'two_column_theme.css'
      @scripts << 'poll.js'
    #
    # 100 more lines like above
    #
    end
    render :action => find_view, :layout => layout
  end
end

So I'm not very happy about this and ultimately I'd like to refactor the app to use different controllers for different objects (crazy huh?), but that is a major undertaking as the whole app assumes this architecture. It occurred to me the other day that there's an in-between step. I could do something like this:

class Car < ActiveRecord::Base
  def layout
    'two_column'
  end
  def stylesheets
    ['two_column_layout.css', 'two_column_theme.css']
  end
  def scripts
    []
  end
end

And then the Ford class would look like this:

class Ford < Car
  def layout
    'ford'
  end
  def stylesheets
    ['ford_layout.css', 'ford_theme.css']
  end
  def scripts
    ['discount.js']
  end
end

So the CarController could then be shortened to this:

class CarController < ApplicationController
  def car
    @car = Car.find(params[:id])
    @scripts = @car.scripts
    @stylesheets = @car.stylesheets
    
    render :action => find_view, :layout => @car.layout
  end
end

Any model that needs to overwrite the default layout, scripts, or stylesheets can.

So should I take this step and put view information in the models, or should I just hold out for the big refactor into separate controllers? Keep in mind the big refactor is so big that it may never happen.

Read: I'm Thinking of Putting View Logic into a Model

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