CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubycoding-style
user1540217
user1540217

Reputation: 3

Best Optimal way to produce HTML in Ruby on Rails views

I have recently started learning Ruby on rails and going through various tutorials. Previously, I did code in PHP.

One of the practices I found in the tutorials is as below. I wanted to know, if this is the optimal way? What are the possible scenarios this is used?

For e.g, When generating a form in the views, the below code was used:

<h1>Contact us</h1>
<%= form_tag do %>
  <%= label_tag ('Name') %>
  <%= text_field_tag 'Name','Enter name here'%>
  <%= label_tag ('Email') %>
  <%= email_field_tag('Email', @email, options = {}) %>
  <%= submit_tag "Edit this article" %>
<% end %>

Would it not a be a good practice to use HTML code directly in the view and just use ruby wherever dynamic stuffs are generated? Is there any reason I should use the methods to generate html other than the sole reason for faster coding (for people who are more familiar with ruby methods). Since, I am new at ruby, I would be faster coding HTML and use Ruby only when required and not for simple reasons of generating HTML.

What is the industry practice. Will getting into this habit of not using Ruby methods to generate html make it tough for me to read other's code?

Thanks for any responses in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 141

Answers (3)

Jon Cairns
Jon Cairns

Reputation: 11951

The ruby methods you're using are called helpers. They are there to do just that: help. At first, there's a lot to learn, but after learning them they save a great deal of time. Also, they aren't ruby methods, they belong to the rails framework - the language and the framework are two distinct things.

Here are some reasons why you should use the view helpers:

  • All the HTML produced by helpers will follow the same structure, making your HTML more consistent.
  • They can save you from running into bugs. For instance, if you write out the full HTML you might miss out a closing tag. If you use the rails helpers you can be sure that the HTML produced is valid and correct. It virtually eliminates a potential entry point for bugs.
  • Other rails developers are familiar with those methods, and will find it easier working with your code (if that ever has to happen).
  • From an aesthetic point of view, I much prefer reading helper methods than trying to scan through lines and lines of HTML, and I'm sure many others are the same. It's far more concise.

Upvotes: 0

Anezio Campos
Anezio Campos

Reputation: 1555

The helpers on Rails really helps, they are not there to make it more difficult. When you get used you feel great for using it.

Anyway you can still use html code directly, if you don't want to learn or use helpers you can do it, but you will be missing a cool thing in rails and certainly if it happens that you should work in a team I'm certain that the rest of the team will use the helpers and not html.

And rails promotes "convention over configuration", and one of the good points on that is to know that as a rails developer you will be able to work without much adaptation on any Rails project without getting lost looking for files, how is mvc working, and other stuff like that.

When you study and practice more the use of helpers you will start to see all the "power" of it, and see how much it really helps.

Upvotes: 0

kiddorails
kiddorails

Reputation: 13014

These are the methods of ActionView::Helper::FormHelpers. They don't only generate the bare HTML markup. Apart from inserting the tags, they also add adequate id, class, data attributes etc. The dynamically inserted id for instance is responsible for creating the available params hash, which in turn is responsible for most of the form actions in your controller.

You can try inserting that by directly using HTML, but two things will happen:

  1. Dirty and verbose HTML markup.
  2. Unconventional use.
  3. Security issues such as XSS exploits. (as pointed out by Denis)

Upvotes: 1

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