to_s FTDRY

Wijnand Wiersma do 02 sep 10

Here is just a quick tip: define more to_s methods on your models to DRY up you views. It’s a very Ruby thing to do and if you keep this method fairly on top of your classes it won’t be very confusing for other developers.

For one project I have 3 models: include, exclude and split. When I want to display them I only want to show the only defined property they have: path

I display them regularly in views and it gets used in background processes where it is concatenated into a bigger string.

So instead of writing include.path everytime I went for this approach:

def to_s
  path
end

From now on I can do something like this in my views:

<li><%= include %></li>

And where it gets concatenated:

"#{first_include} something here #{second_include}"

includes.join(" ")

Another nice example might be a person class where you display the persons name regularly in views. If you keep the parts of the name in multiple properties you are getting a bigger win:

def name
  [first_name, last_name_prefix, last_name].reject{|x|x.blank?}.join ' '
 end

So if you display an object as a string a lot defining a to_s method and just put in your plain object in your view will certainly a nice way to get more DRY.

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