I was wondering if someone could do me massive favour..
I really don't understand how to make use of APIs - so I was wondering if, using Basecamp as an example, someone could talk me though the basics.
So far I have an application with a dashboard controller/view, I have put basecamp.rb into my /lib directory, added the following to my application_controller:
def basecamp_connect
Basecamp.establish_connection!('XXXXXX.basecamphq.com', 'USER', 'PASS', false)
#basecamp = Basecamp.new
end
Obviously changing the required parts to my credentials.
Next up I have added the following to my dashboard_controller:
def index
Basecamp::TodoList.find(:all)
end
Next I presume I have to somehow list the Todos on the dashboard using some sort of loop.
Am I doing the right thing, if so - how on earth do I display all the todo items and if not - what am I doing wrong/missing.
It doesn't have to be todos, anything from Basecamp or any other popular API service would be a good start. It's just that I happen to have a basecamp account!
Thanks,
Danny
Your view expects to have some variables defined. You can loop through those variables and display their content as you want.
So you could do, in your action :
def index
#list = Basecamp::TodoList.find(:all)
end
Then in your view you have access to the #list variable and you can to the following :
<ul>
<% #list.each do |item| %>
<li><%= item.to_json</li>
<% end %>
</ul>
Replacing the json dump by the elements as you wish to display them of course.
You might want to read the rails guides to get a lot more of informations.
Related
I have extensively researched this matter both on Stack Overflow and Google but found nothing conclusive. Since I'm completely new to the concept of API usage within Rails I have to ask for some advice.
I have followed the procedure from the github page
I have included the Unsplash helper in application_helper.rb as follows
def show_photo
Unsplash::Photo.find("tAKXap853rY")
end
and simply added
<%= image_tag show_photo %>
in my view.
This returns an object (So connectivity is good)
<img src="/images/#<Unsplash::Photo:0x007fc4b2f953c0>" alt="#
<unsplash::photo:0x007fc4b2f953c0>">
I'm aware that Rails is looking for a picture in the assets/images folder
How do I parse the inbound JSON and render it in my Rails view?
You can access to the urls key within the OpenStruct attributes in the Photo object that includes the raw, full, regular, small and thumb sizes, also as keys.
So, just to test you could use the raw one, like:
<%= image_tag Unsplash::Photo.find('tAKXap853rY')[:urls][:raw] %>
Or I think you could modify your method to accept one parameter which is the size key of the image, like:
module ApplicationHelper
def show_photo(size)
Unsplash::Photo.find("tAKXap853rY")[:urls][size.to_sym]
end
end
Then:
<%= show_photo('raw') %> # 'full', 'regular', etc ...
further to this solution I am trying to display the photographer's name by using the user.name method.
In the console I can get the following :
photo = Unsplash::Photo.find("tAKXap853rY")
photo.user.name
will return
=> "Alejandro Escamilla".
But in RAILS :
def show_photo(size)
#photo =Unsplash::Photo.find("tAKXap853rY")[:urls][size.to_sym]
end
just trying to display the name in my view like:
<%= #photo.user.name %> will return "user undefined method".
The .user.name is accessible in the console but not in rails! What have I missed? Thanks
Imagine a typical, modern web app - where in the navbar or some navigation element that runs along the top there is a notifications menu where it tells the user how many notifications they have received since last visiting.
It also may have a dropdown menu that they can clear off existing notifications or just view them.
Given that these notifications need to be present across all views, where should I put the logic for that? In my ApplicationController? That feels wrong, for some reason - but I can't see any other explanation.
Also, should I put the actual partials within the generic /shared/ folder?
For those apps that have a Dashboard controller (i.e. a non-restful resource) that just acts as the central hub for a lot of this info, what's the best way to approach this? In terms of structuring partials that will be included in the Dashboard.
Edit 1
Building off of the answers given by both Kevin and Collin below, I need to go a bit further.
They recommend the Facade pattern as explained by Sandi Metz via Thoughtbot here.
However, this is my issue. In my application.html.erb, I have a partial being rendered - <%= render partial: "shared/navbar" %>. In that partial, I want to be able to call somethings (e.g. that #notifications). How would I access that instance variable and other shared variables/resources on other partials that would be declared in this facades/dashboard.rb?
Use a Facade pattern as described in this article.
See the section on: Only instantiate one object in the controller.
They even use notifications on a dashboard in their example. :)
It's important to remember a couple of things here:
First, only put this logic in your ApplicationController if it's the only place it could possibly go. Since this notifications menu is more than likely persisted across the entire application, that's probably where it belongs.
Secondly, you can implement this Facade while still keeping your DashboardsController quite RESTful. Controllers should only be responsible for instantiating a single object, right? Thus, it makes sense to do something like this:
app/controllers/dashboards_controller.rb
class DashboardsController < ApplicationController
def show
#dashboard = Dashboard.new(current_user)
end
end
app/facades/dashboard.rb
class Dashboard
def initialize(user)
#user = user
end
def new_status
#new_status ||= Status.new
end
def statuses
Status.for(user)
end
def notifications
#notifications ||= user.notifications
end
private
attr_reader :user
end
app/views/dashboards/show.html.erb
<%= render 'profile' %>
<%= render 'groups', groups: #dashboard.group %>
<%= render 'statuses/form', status: #dashboard.new_status %>
<%= render 'statuses', statuses: #dashboard.statuses %>
The Dashboard model gives you back all the pertinent information you need, and your controller gets to focus on a single entity. Beautiful!
UPDATE
In order to use your #dashboard instance variable inside of any partials, it's recommended you render it with a local, which is essentially a designated variable for use inside of a partial.
Here's a great link on how to get started passing locals to a partial.
I'm learning Ruby on Rails (my first MVC) and have successfully setup a many-to-many relationship between "Agents" and "Zipcodes." What I'm trying to do currently is to get the associated agent based on the zip code entered by the user. I'm able to so successfully in the console, but am having a difficult time translating it to a controller and view.
What I do in the console:
zip = Zipcode.find_by_zip(gets.chomp)
=> 92562
zip.agents
The hangup I'm having is how to translate this into an action that I can access from a view with a form.
I've started by defining the action (agents#find), but am stumped as to whether this is correct and what comes after it.
def find
#user_zip = Zipcode.find_by_zip(params[:zip])
end
Hopefully someone awesome in here can point a n00b in the right direction.
When just starting with rails, I'd suggest avoiding custom actions like #find as much as possible, and instead sticking to the "Big 7" RESTful routes. Rails is really smooth when you work with it and do what it expects.
It sounds like maybe you're trying to identify a given zipcode, and then list all the agents associated with it. That sounds like a #show on Zipcode.
config/routes.rb
resources :zipcodes
app/controllers/zipcodes_controller.rb
ZipcodesController < ApplicationController
def show
#zipcode = Zipcode.find_by_zip(params[:id])
end
end
app/views/zipcodes/show.html.erb
<div>
<p>This zipcode has the following agents:</p>
<ul>
<%= #zipcode.agents.each do |agent| %>
<li>Agent #<%= agent.id %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
You can see this page by browsing to /zipcodes/[zip].
Just put #user_zip = Zipcode.find_by_zip(params[:zip]) in the controller instead of the model.
In the view you will be able to call #user_zip.
Welcome to Rails! I recently started learning Rails as well, but I think I can help: A controller action will redirect by default to a view with the same name. So after assigning the value of #user_zip, the controller will serve up agents/find.html.erb, which will have access to #user_zip. Since #user_zip is an instance of Zipcode, you'd be able to use #user_zip.agents.
Somewhat tangential, but I also suggest considering using search rather than find for the action name, only because find and its variations are used elsewhere in Rails.
Good morning,
In my Ruby On Rails application I am trying to build a stat counter for wins and for losses.
These stats are displayed in the sidebar of my page, which is always visible. For these values i use a model named Stats. The stats should be available global, since I want to display them on every side so they were put into application_helper.rb. I also have two actions, that should be called if you click on the add win / or add loss link, which is only displayed for admins. After clicking the link you get redirected to the main page. At the moment, both counters increase each time someone enters the site or refreshes it. Can you please help me, I am looking to solve this problem now for several hours and i still don't get it.
My application_helper
module ApplicationHelper
def stats
#stats = Stats.find(1)
end
def addwin
#stats = Stats.find(1)
#stats.update_attribute(:wins, #stats.wins+1)
end
def addloss
#stats = Stats.find(1)
#stats.update_attribute(:loss, #stats.loss+1)
end
end
An extract of my application.html.erb file, where the sidebar is located:
<tr><td>Dotards StatsTracker</td></tr>
<tr><td>Wins: </td><td style="color:green"><%= stats.wins%></td></tr>
<tr><td>Losses: </td><td style="color:red"><%= stats.loss%></td></tr>
<hr>
</table >
<%if user_signed_in? && current_user.admin? %>
<small><%= link_to "Add Win", news_index_path(addwin) %>|<%= link_to "Add Loss", news_index_path(addloss)%></small>
<% end %>
Would be awesome if someone could help me, because I don't know what else i can do.
Thank you very much in advance.
news_index_path(addwin)
calls the add win method directly on generation of the page, that's why the counter is increased.
move the two methods to an appropriate controller (maybe news_controller?) and create routes in config/routes.rb like this:
match '/addwin', to: 'news#addwin'
then you get path helpers which you can use like this:
link_to "Add Win" addwin_path
run rake routes to see the helper names generated.
addition: I would also consider your Singleton Stat into a model, and define methods there which are just used by the controller.
I have a Ruby/Rails app that has two or three main "sections". When a user visits that section, I wish to display some sub-navigation. All three sections use the same layout, so I can't "hard code" the navigation into the layout.
I can think of a few different methods to do this. I guess in order to help people vote I'll put them as answers.
Any other ideas? Or what do you vote for?
You can easily do this using partials, assuming each section has it's own controller.
Let's say you have three sections called Posts, Users and Admin, each with it's own controller: PostsController, UsersController and AdminController.
In each corresponding views directory, you declare a _subnav.html.erb partial:
/app/views/users/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/posts/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/admin/_subnav.html.erb
In each of these subnav partials you declare the options specific to that section, so /users/_subnav.html.erb might contain:
<ul id="subnav">
<li><%= link_to 'All Users', users_path %></li>
<li><%= link_to 'New User', new_user_path %></li>
</ul>
Whilst /posts/_subnav.html.erb might contain:
<ul id="subnav">
<li><%= link_to 'All Posts', posts_path %></li>
<li><%= link_to 'New Post', new_post_path %></li>
</ul>
Finally, once you've done this, you just need to include the subnav partial in the layout:
<div id="header">...</div>
<%= render :partial => "subnav" %>
<div id="content"><%= yield %></div>
<div id="footer">...</div>
Partial render. This is very similar to the helper method except perhaps the layout would have some if statements, or pass that off to a helper...
As for the content of your submenus, you can go at it in a declarative manner in each controller.
class PostsController < ApplicationController
#...
protected
helper_method :menu_items
def menu_items
[
['Submenu 1', url_for(me)],
['Submenu 2', url_for(you)]
]
end
end
Now whenever you call menu_items from a view, you'll have the right list to iterate over for the specific controller.
This strikes me as a cleaner solution than putting this logic inside view templates.
Note that you may also want to declare a default (empty?) menu_items inside ApplicationController as well.
Warning: Advanced Tricks ahead!
Render them all. Hide the ones that you don't need using CSS/Javascript, which can be trivially initialized in any number of ways. (Javascript can read the URL used, query parameters, something in a cookie, etc etc.) This has the advantage of potentially playing much better with your cache (why cache three views and then have to expire them all simultaneously when you can cache one?), and can be used to present a better user experience.
For example, let's pretend you have a common tab bar interface with sub navigation. If you render the content of all three tabs (i.e. its written in the HTML) and hide two of them, switching between two tabs is trivial Javascript and doesn't even hit your server. Big win! No latency for the user. No server load for you.
Want another big win? You can use a variation on this technique to cheat on pages which might but 99% common across users but still contain user state. For example, you might have a front page of a site which is relatively common across all users but say "Hiya Bob" when they're logged in. Put the non-common part ("Hiya, Bob") in a cookie. Have that part of the page be read in via Javascript reading the cookie. Cache the entire page for all users regardless of login status in page caching. This is literally capable of slicing 70% of the accesses off from the entire Rails stack on some sites.
Who cares if Rails can scale or not when your site is really Nginx serving static assets with new HTML pages occasionally getting delivered by some Ruby running on every thousandth access or so ;)
You could use something like the navigation plugin at http://rpheath.com/posts/309-rails-plugin-navigation-helper
It doesn't do sub-section navigation out of the box, but with a little tweaking you could probably set it up to do something similar.
I suggest you use partials. There are a few ways you can go about it. When I create partials that are a bit picky in that they need specific variables, I also create a helper method for it.
module RenderHelper
#options: a nested array of menu names and their corresponding url
def render_submenu(menu_items=[[]])
render :partial => 'shared/submenu', :locals => {:menu_items => menu_items}
end
end
Now the partial has a local variable named menu_items over which you can iterate to create your submenu. Note that I suggest a nested array instead of a hash because a hash's order is unpredictable.
Note that the logic deciding what items should be displayed in the menu could also be inside render_submenu if that makes more sense to you.
I asked pretty much the same question myself: Need advice: Structure of Rails views for submenus? The best solution was probably to use partials.
There is another possible way to do this: Nested Layouts
i don't remember where i found this code so apologies to the original author.
create a file called nested_layouts.rb in your lib folder and include the following code:
module NestedLayouts
def render(options = nil, &block)
if options
if options[:layout].is_a?(Array)
layouts = options.delete(:layout)
options[:layout] = layouts.pop
inner_layout = layouts.shift
options[:text] = layouts.inject(render_to_string(options.merge({:layout=>inner_layout}))) do |output,layout|
render_to_string(options.merge({:text => output, :layout => layout}))
end
end
end
super
end
end
then, create your various layouts in the layouts folder, (for example 'admin.rhtml' and 'application.rhtml').
Now in your controllers add this just inside the class:
include NestedLayouts
And finally at the end of your actions do this:
def show
...
render :layout => ['admin','application']
end
the order of the layouts in the array is important. The admin layout will be rendered inside the application layout wherever the 'yeild' is.
this method can work really well depending on the design of the site and how the various elements are organized. for instance one of the included layouts could just contain a series of divs that contain the content that needs to be shown for a particular action, and the CSS on a higher layout could control where they are positioned.
There are few approaches to this problem.
You might want to use different layouts for each section.
You might want to use a partial included by all views in a given directory.
You might want to use content_for that is filled by either a view or a partial, and called in the global layout, if you have one.
Personally I believe that you should avoid more abstraction in this case.