I've spent a couple hours prowling through Sequels source code trying to figure
out how to accomplish this. In the process, I've become really really impressed
with Sequel. Wow, there's a phenomenal amount of flexibility in there.
***
I've figured out that all the various templating engines for converting regular
Ruby stuff into HTML for web pages are going to be 'too little too late' for
me, and I'm moving to building the entire page dynamically in my controller.
I've created a couple of new methods on String to make that a bit easier.
"Something or other".to_html(:p) becomes "<p>Something or other</p>", for
example. I also have a .to_link method:
myProductDataset.collect {|product|
product.name.to_link("?id=#{product.pk}")}
I think I can clean things up a lot more, though, with a slightly different
approach. I'd like to teach Sequel::Model to take over a lot of the work of
making db data HTML-ready.
It would use a subclass of String (call it WebString) that Sequel::Model would
use as the base type for all the string values. WebString would have .to_html
and .to_link methods, where .to_link automatically creates a link tag based on
the primary key of its model. (I'll probably switch from directly using the
model's primary key to using some kind of session-specific id code at some
point.)
My ultimate vision goes something like this:
I build a dataset just like usual. I tell it that stuff in the second
column should have its .to_html method overridden with .to_link. I add the
dataset to an array or other output collector. My work is now done. When it's
time to create the view, my output routine checks for objects that respond to
.to_html, and calls it if they do. The dataset itself responds to .to_html by
building a table (or maybe it uses nested DIV tags, or whatever), and in turn
calls .to_html or .to_s on its rows, which in turn calls .to_html on the
fields. The final result is an HTML table with one column containing hyperlinks
to single item pages.
I suspect at some point .to_html will decompose to XML objects rather than
directly to plain strings. But I know the first step is to upgrade the
functionality of my dataset output objects.
I *think* this can be done by creating a plug-in and overriding some existing
methods. However, I haven't yet been able to figure out *what,* exactly, I
should consider overriding to do this. Can anybody give me some suggestions as
to where to look?
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