Struggling to view all database entries in my HTML output

Question

I've got a pretty simple Ruby on Rails app that has a text box where I can enter content, limited to 200 characters, into a database.

My goal is to list the items below the text box so that when a user enters something, it appears at the top of an ever-growing list.

Right now I have some crappy code that doesn't work, but I'm not sure why.

In my view page, located at home.html.erb, I have this area for the lessons to be viewed in:

<td class="my-lessons">

</td>

In my Lesson controller I have the following:

  def printLesson
    @lesson = Lesson.find(params[:id])

    puts @lesson.content
  end

I'm not sure how to call printLesson in my code and just generally how to show the content of the Lessons database.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I believe I am. I'm not advanced enough to do anything else right now. I'm not calling the method properly, I know that. I'm not sure how to call that method and have it spit out the contents of the first Lesson — Zack Shapiro
– Zack Shapiro, Commented May 14, 2012 at 6:53

Soliah · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-14 07:11:58Z

3

home.html.erb gets rendered when you go to http://localhost:3000/lesson/home provided you have the appropriate route defined in routes.rb:

match 'lesson/home' => 'lesson#home'

So in your Lesson controller, in the home action have the following:

def home
  @lessons = Lesson.all
end

Now in your home.html.erb view render the contents of @lessons

<% @lessons.each do |lesson| %>
<tr>
    <td class="my-lessons">
      <%= lesson.Name %>
    </td>
</tr>
<% end %>

The problem you're having is thinking that you have to tell Rails to spit out the input in your controller action (the line puts @lesson.content). Rails works on convention. Any instance variables created in your controller's action will be accessible in your view. So the @lessons variable in the example above is accessible in the home.html.erb view.

I suggest having a read at the following for more info to do with routes and rendering views:

edited May 14, 2012 at 7:11

answered May 14, 2012 at 6:56

Soliah

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4 Comments

Zack Shapiro Over a year ago

One miscommunication I think that came from my end, the route to home.html.erb is app/views/pages/home.html.erb rather than app/views/lessons/home.html.erb. Any idea what kind of routing finagling needs to be done?

Soliah Over a year ago

The location of the views in the app don't correspond to paths in the URL. You're far better of following Rails conventions and putting it in app/views/lesson/home.html.erb.

Zack Shapiro Over a year ago

Thanks Soliah. So I've got that working, showing those lessons. What's the most efficient way to get those same things showing up in views/pages/home.html.erb?

Soliah Over a year ago

The easiest for you would be to move the code from the lesson_controller.rb to a new controller page_controller.rb, renaming instances of Lesson to Page. Then modify the route to go to pages instead.

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