Rails - Create an helper method that print a specific attribute of all objects (render an array instead)

Question

Sorry for this simple question but I am stuck here.

I am trying to create a helper method that simply prints for each object the attribute "name" of my Table "Term".

I tried this:

def display_name(terms)
  terms.each do |term|
    p term.name
  end
end

But instead of printing each objects name, it prints an array for each object with all attributes.

As an example:

[#<Term id: 1, name: "test", definition: "first definition", created_at: "2011-07-21 14:52:12", updated_at: "2011-07-21 14:52:12">, 
 #<Term id: 2, name: "second test", definition: "blabla", created_at: "2011-07-20 18:00:42", updated_at: "2011-07-20 18:04:15">

I am trying to find what I can do with the documentation (content_tag, concat, collect) but it doesn't seem to provide the result I want..

Thanks for your explanation

DanneManne · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-22 01:48:05Z

4

The reason for this is because it does not actually print the name, it returns the value from terms.each since that was the last statement in the method.

I would probably use the map method to collect all the names into an array first and if you want a String instead of an Array then I would join them with whatever separator that is preferred, like this:

def display_name(terms)
  terms.map(&:name).join ", "
end

You could also add a parameter to choose the separator if you like. Like this:

def display_name(terms, sep = ", ")
  terms.map(&:name).join sep
end

# in view
display_name(collection, "<br/>")

By default it then uses a comma to separate them but you can manually choose something else.

answered Jul 22, 2011 at 1:48

DanneManne

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2 Comments

benoitr Over a year ago

I thought in that case I didn't need to use an array. Thanks a lot it's really clear now!

jxpx777 Over a year ago

Note that if performance is a big concern for you &:sym will be quite a bit slower than writing the blocks by hand: m.onkey.org/let-s-start-with-wtf

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