[LRUG] Best practice for reports

[Tom Armitage]

Just to come back to this:

> <th><%= f.name</th><td><%= Foo.count(:conditions => "blah") %></td>

I'm not sure that's so heinous, given what it looks like you're doing  
could be abstracted away into a class method on Foo. I think putting  
a :conditions kv pair inside the view is ugly, and puts the logic in  
the wrong place, but there's nothing to stop you doing something like  
this (if, say, you want a report on how many articles published this  
month:)

class Article
   def self.count_this_month
     find (:conditions => "blah")
   end
end

and then calling Article.count_this_month in the view. Yes, strictly,  
it's still an AR call in a view, but you've kept the business logic  
in the model where it belongs, and the view just contains a method  
name. Also: it's a method call related to all "Articles", rather than  
a particular one - I think class methods on a view are definitely  
less smelly than business logic on individual instances of a class in  
a view. I've worked on various projects where we've ended up doing  
this - writing appropriate class methods to solve such a problem -  
and it then, of course, means your class methods are reprposable.

It also smells less bad than your original, but avoids having to go  
down fiddly pattern-based routes. Thoughts?

---
Tom Armitage
tom at infovore.org
07813 060578