CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsdry
Mike Ray
Mike Ray

Reputation: 91

Conditional <div> tags inside the view. Why bad?

In my rails app I have a very dynamic user dashboard that shows and hides div elements based on the users role (customer, employee, admin).

For example: users/show.html.erb

 <% if current_user.role_id == 4 %>
    <th>Edit</th>
    <th>Delete</th>
    <% elsif current_user.role_id == 1 %>
    <th>Cancel Appointment</th>
    <% else %>
    <% end %>
    </tr>
    </thead>

I stored the table nav tabs inside their own partials like this:

<% if current_user.role_id == 1 %>
<%= render 'users/customer_bar' %>
<% elsif current_user.role_id == 2 %>
<%= render 'users/employee_bar' %>
<% elsif current_user.role_id == 4 %>
<%= render 'users/honcho_bar' %>

The same could be done for the aforementioned tags but that would not at all be DRY. Is there a better way? Why is it bad to conditionally format tags in this way?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 717

Answers (1)

Richard Peck
Richard Peck

Reputation: 76784

Statement

Maybe you're looking for case / switch:

case current_user.role_id
when 4
  #do something for 4 
when 1
  #do something for 1
end

--

System

I would highly recommend using a partial to get this to work:

<%= render partial: "your_partial", local: { your_local_var: "value" } %>

This will allow you to define the conditions in the partial itself:

#app/views/controller/your_partial.html.erb
<% if var == "value" %>
  ...
<% else %>
  ...
<% end %>

Bad?

I wouldn't say it's "bad" for the sake of it - it's typically the case that you'll need conditions. The issue, I think, is you need to ensure you're able to handle the conditions in the most effective way.

Using case / switch would be a legitimate way of doing this, however, you may have an issue further up the stack

Upvotes: 2

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