Code in Views and Code in the Wrong Place are two of
the top 20 Rails development No-No's that came up in
Chad Fowler's straw poll on Twitter about poor practices in Ruby on Rails.
Domain code in controllers and views isn't a problem that's limited to Rails, of course. It's a problem everywhere, and one you generally need to remain vigilant about. Rails doesn't make it easy by making it easy - it's much too easy to do the wrong thing.
You've got the view open and think, "I need to get a list of Widgets."
<% widgets = Widget.find(:all, :conditions=>["owner=?",session[:user_id]]) %>
That was easy, and it's even easier in controllers where you don't have the hassle of angled brackets and percent signs. Worse yet, since you've got what you need right there, it's easy to add more logic around it. Before you know it, your views and controllers are cluttered with a bunch of crap that shouldn't be there.
I fall into the trap more often than I'd like to admit. And I
know it's wrong. What of those who haven't a clue?
To combat this syndrome, I created a Rails plugin called FindFail that makes ActiveRecord::Base#find private.
FindFail results in less business logic in your views and controllers because it forces you to open a model and add a
method. Since you're already in the right place, you may as well stay there. It makes it hard to do the wrong thing, and contributes to making it easier to do the right thing.
It preys on your laziness that way.
It's only one line of useful code, but it can help keep the rest of your code clean.
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