Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Multi column list Rails helper

Posted 27 September 2006 @ 7am | Tagged thoughts

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Of course once you’ve noticed the multi column list pattern is prevalent in your app, it only makes sense to turn it into a helper! Here’s the example from my previous blog post rewritten to use the new helper. Notice how much cleaner it is. Don’t you love Ruby?

Usage:

<%= render_multi_column_list friends do |friend|
      display friend
    end %>

Implementation:

def render_multi_column_list(items, cols=4)
  returning (rendered="") do
    items.in_groups_of(items.size/cols) do |group|
      rendered << %{ <div class='narrow-col'><ul> }
      group.each do |item|
        rendered << "<li>" << yield(item) << "</li>" if item
      end
      rendered << %{ </ul></div> }
    end
  end
end

pretty sweet!

That’s great, but is it possible to pass more variables such as an item id and an item name so you can even make the list link to the individual objects in it?
And for some reason the display function doesn’t work for me, it gives a unknown method error for write #objectid, hoew can I solve this?
Thanks