Controller:
@songs = Song.find(:all)

View:
h2%= @song.title.titleize %/h2
%= show_rating(@song.rating) %

Helper:
def show_rating rate
..if rate && rate.nonzero?
….rate.times { image_tag ’star.gif’, :alt => ’star’ }
..else
….”This song hasn’t been rated yet”
..end
end

While there’s no problem with a for loop, the syntax is a bit off, so I’d change that to:

Next .capitalize would be better for putting the title’s first letter in uppercase:

The rating statement could definetely do with a bit of trimming:
” * song.rating : “This song hasn’t been rated yet” %>

would be the way I’d clean it up, and I’d probably move it to a helper too.

Anyway that’s my take on it

Note: Just in case the formatting on this gets messed up, I’ve made a Pastie at http://pastie.caboo.se/83477

I wrote it in haml, think it might be easier to read (still need .. for indent though!)

###############################
-for each song in Song.find(:all)
..%h2=song.title.first.upcase
..(song.rating||0).times do
….%img{:src=>’star.gif‘, :alt>=’star’}/
..=”This song hasn’t been rated yet” unless song.rating
###############################

# index.rhtml
% @songs.each do |song| -%
..%= song.title.capitalize %
..%= rating_stars(song.rating) %
% end -%

# Controller
@songs = Song.find(:all)

# Helper
def show_rating(rating)
. if rating && rating > 0
. . (1..rating).each { image_tag ’star.gif’, :alt => ‘*’ }
. else
. . “This song has not been rated”
. end
end

# View (HAML)
- @songs.each do |song|
. %h2= h(song.titleize)
. = show_rating(song.rating)

# Me
self.drink! :coffey


First, in the controller:
@songs = Song.find(:all)

Second, in the migration that created songs, I’d set the default for rating to 1 and make rating an int. This gets rid of the need to check for nil in the rating. I’d think about validating for this in the model as well.

Here’s the view:

% @songs.each do |song| %
h2%= song.title.titleize %/h2
%= song.rating > 0 ? image_tag(’star.gif’) * rating : “This song hasn’t been rated yet” %
% end %

I tend to use the trinary operator a lot, so I find that readable. Others may differ

Scott

Oh yeah, if you use image tag like that, you need to have star.gif in the public/images directory. This seems more railsy to me. If you really want it in public, then I think that calling it like image_tag(’/star.gif’) will do the trick.

It actually was the first time I ever used “for … in ….” instead of @songs.each{|song| }
I just saw it in previous code, and gave it a try!
But in every Ruby tutorial I saw, .each has been used.

I didn’t know “for … in …” was syntactic sugar for Array#each though…

Do you have any other examples of “Rubyer” code?

do..end vs {}
“a”

As far as do..end or braces, they’re both very Ruby. The difference tends to be mostly stylistic, with braces being used more for short, one-line code blocks and do..end for blocks that take more code. Don’t let this fool you into thinking they’re the same though. When using variable assignment and the return value from a block, do…end will sometimes raise an error as it doesn’t bind as tightly as braces do and the assignment can’t properly determine what’s going on. This doesn’t happen a lot but when it does, you’ll be glad you learned that braces bind tighter.