Nested Resources in Rails views

Question

I know there are many articles on Rails nested resources and I went through a lot of them but nothing answers my question.

I have 3 models: user, group and micropost. User subscribes to groups, each having a number of microposts. All the association are in place and working fine.

What I want to achieve is to have the homepage where users have tabs of their groups, each listing the microposts within that group.

This is what I am doing at the moment:

#Home Controller
def home
 if logged_in?
  @groups=current_user.group
 end
end

I have created a function in the user model that returns microposts belonging to a specific group

def group_feed(group_id)
     microposts_ids = "SELECT micropost_id from groupings WHERE group_id IN (#{group_id})"
     Micropost.where("id IN (#{microposts_ids})")
end

In my view

    <div class="panel-body">
    <div class="tab-content">
      <% @groups.each do |group| %>

      <div class="tab-pane fade <%= 'in active' if current_user.group.first == group %>" id="<%=(group.name.gsub(/[0-9]+/, "")+group.id.to_s).parameterize%>">

        <div class="panel panel-default">

         <%= render current_user.group_feed(group.id) %>

       </div>

     </div>
     <% end %>
   </div>
 </div>

This is working fine at the moment, but I suspect it is the right way to do it. I would like to be able to pass resources from the controller to the view rather than calling the model action from the view.

Is there any way to define @microposts in the controller and having it nested under each group in @groups?

Answer 1

I think the way your view works is quite normal, but I suspect that the way you are using relationships in the database is non railsy at the least.

I assume you are using ActiveRecord.

Inside your models you should have something like this.

# app/models/user.rb
class User
  has_many :groupings
  has_many :groups, through: :groupings
end

# app/models/grouping.rb
class Grouping
  belongs_to :group
  belongs_to :user
end

# app/models/group.rb
class Group
  has_many :microposts
  # this would be optional
  has_many :groupings
  has_many :users, through: :groupings
end

# app/models/micropost.rb
class Micropost
  belongs_to :group
end

Thus in your controller you could set @groups = current_user.groups and in your view you could call group.microposts.each.

If you wanted to set both in the controller you could do something like this:

@groups = current_user.groups
@microposts = @groups.map(&:microposts)

And then in your view you could call:

@groups.each_with_index do |group, index|
  # do something with group
  @microposts[index].each do |micropost|
    # do something with micropost
  end
end

But this is kind of tedius.