Simple decoration of objects for presentation. If you don't know what I'm talking about, reading up on decorators and their role in MVC.
Out of the box integration with Rails.
Throw this in your Gemfile:
(For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to assume you're using
frill inside a Rails app. Checkout the
Usage outside Rails section
below for information about how to use this outside of a Rails app.)
Imagine you're creating a web application that includes both a
JSON API and an HTML frontend, and you've decided to always present a
timestamp as YEAR/MONTH/DAY. Furthermore, when presented in HTML, you
always want your timestamps wrapped in
This is a perfect fit for the GoF decorator pattern.
Create a new TimestampFrill module in
module TimestampFrill include Frill def self.frill? object, context object.respond_to? :created_at end def created_at super.strftime "%Y/%m/%d" end end
The first method
Frill what kind of objects this
decorator is applicable to. In our case, it's any object that responds
Next, let's create an
module HtmlTimestampFrill include Frill after TimestampFrill def self.frill? object, context object.respond_to?(:created_at) && context.request.format == "text/html" end def created_at helper.content_tag :b, super end end
Two things to note: the
HtmlTimestampFrill is only applicable to
objects that respond to
created_at when presented in "html". Also, we
Frill to decorate after
TimestampFrill is applied (so that
created_at returns our
Next, in our controller, we need to decorate our objects with frills:
class PostsController < ApplicationController respond_to :json, :html def show @article = frill Article.find(params[:id]) respond_with @article end end
Notice that we've wrapped our article in a
In your html view, you simply call
<%= @article.created_at %>
The same goes for your JSON view.
Usage outside Rails
There are really just two integrations in a Rails app: the
method inside of your controller, plus the ability to call
ActionView::Helper methods inside of your module methods.
To kickoff the decoration of an object outside of a Rails application,
Frill.decorate my_object, my_context