Comments on: DRYing Up respond_to

By: K. Adam Christensen

K. Adam Christensen — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:41:00 +0000

Going back and taking a good look at this, yeah…this should not be used.

By: Jacob Atzen

Jacob Atzen — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:25:11 +0000

Adam,

I can see where you're coming from - I have had the same thoughts. Doing those respond_to blocks over and over again does not seem very dry to me. I was thinking about doing something even cleaner. Say you have a method like:

def index
  @articles = Article.find(:all)
end

Now if the user wants HTML this would work like in the old days. If the user wants xml on the other hand Rails would automatically call @articles.to_xml. If the user wants csv... you get the picture. The idea being that the return value of the function would automatically get the correct method called.

I'm not sure this idea is good though as I haven't really used respond_to or REST much yet. Perhaps the actions will become too different in real applications for this to actually make sense. But from the outset it does seem there's quite a lot of repetition.

By: Amr Malik

Amr Malik — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:57:09 +0000

Not knocking your approach Adam, but personally, I think the vanilla rails methodology is more obvious. I think DRY is good, but not at the cost of readability or maintainability. Those terms are subjective, but to me the proposed approach seems a bit more confusing than just typing the extra text. Maybe I’m looking at it from an outsider’s perspective.

cheers.

-Amr

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:10:13 +0000

Truth be told, it wasn’t pain but curiosity that led me to do this. I wanted to do some more metaprogramming as an exercise, and I learned a lot from doing this. The code to make this all work is somewhat dark-magic, but you can find many examples of dark-magic though-out the rails source.

Sorry you’re not a fan, although I can see your point about it being less readable.

By: Alain Ravet

Alain Ravet — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:51:56 +0000

Yuk.

I can’t understand you felt such a pain with the clean and standard Rails code that it made you jump through so many oops, to finally end up with much less readable/obvious code.

Please don’t make a plugin.