CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsactiverecord
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Reputation: 27

Best practice to make model accessible throughout app

I'm in the process of creating my own simple blog application and I want to include a 'latest posts' section on the sidebar, so my posts model needs to be accessible by the entire app. I'm looking for the best way of doing so.

I'm thinking a before_filter in the application controller followed up a private method to call the scope I have:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :latest_news

  private
  def latest_news
    @latest = News.latest.limit(5)
  end
end

Is this the best way?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 39

Answers (1)

pdobb
pdobb

Reputation: 18037

Instead of a before_filter, I'd recommend using a lazy-load approach that does basically the same thing.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper_method :latest_news

  def latest_news
    @latest_news ||= News.latest.limit(5)
  end
end

This way you can call latest_news from any controller or view (which is what the helper_method macro does for you) and then it'll load it if it's not loaded already the first time it's called and any subsequent calls will be cached. This is a pretty common pattern for getting things like the current user record, etc.

Upvotes: 1

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