How Beautiful is Ruby?

Working with Ruby and in particular Rails, it’s easy to take the beauty inherent in the language for granted. I mean look at this code. If you read it aloud to yourself, it reads like an english sentence that any non programmer can understand.

Forum.categories.map do |category|
  link_to category.name, category
end.to_sentence

Forum categories map do category, link to category name, the category, end and convert to a sentence. The code returns a an english sentence as well.

Fish, French Bread, Coffee and Hamburgers with each linked to the correct resource as well!

Nesting Resources in Rails Routes.Rb with Namespaces

When I have a controller that takes more than one has_many argument, I think about creating a namespace. This way I may still use my forums, pages controllers w/out needing any conditional logic, testing for the presence of :course_id in the params hash.

#config/routes.rb
map.namespace :courses, :path_prefix=>'/courses/:course_id' do |courses|
  courses.resources :forums
  courses.resources :pages
end

map.resources :courses
map.resources :forums
map.resources :pages

# some view.html.erb
<%= courses_forums_path(1) %> /courses/1/forums
<%= courses_pages_path(2) %> /courses/2/pages
# w/ use in a form don't forget to pass an array instead of just the resource (will map to forums_controller)
<%=form_for [:courses, Forum.new] do |f| %><%end%>

in the namespaced controller you can extend the parent controller (if you like) to have access to methods coursescontroller defines.

# app/controllers/courses/forums_controller.rb
class Courses::ForumsController < CoursesController
 before_filter :require_course_login #defined in parent ../courses_controller.rb
 def index
  end
end

to use the generator to create namespaced controller

./script/generate controller 'courses/forums'