Add unordered_list helper

[jgaskins]

In an effort to reduce some common boilerplate for templates, I present to you an unordered_list view helper that will allow us to reduce this:

<ul class="items">
  <% @items.each do |item| %>
    <li class="item"><%= link_to item.name, item %></li>
  <% end %>
</ul>

down to this:

<%= unordered_list(@items) { |item| link_to item.name, item } %>

[drogus]

thanks for the patch, but I'm -1 for this. It will work only for simplest cases, but if you for example need anything more than just classes on ul and li elements you will have to revert to regular HTML or extend the helper, which will probably make it complicated and will make code harder to read.

[jgaskins]

I agree that it's primarily for simple cases. The idea was to make those simple cases even simpler because I find myself writing the simple cases often enough. :-)

I didn't think about this at the time, but I think doing something like this:

<%= unordered_list @items do |item| %>
  <%= markup_for_item %>
  <%= more_markup_for_item %>
<% end %>

would be a good use case for this — unfortunately in it's current form, it won't do that so I'd have to keep going with it. I just thought it'd be a good idea to get rid of some of the repetition of writing loops over collections.

EDIT: Okay, I lied. The above code totally works. I had a typo in my view code. :-)

[rafaelfranca]

I'm 👎 with this one too. You already can do this:

content_tag_for(:li, @items, :class => "item") do |item|
  <%= link_to item.name, item %>
end

[drogus]

@jgaskins you could just wrap @rafaelfranca's code in a simple helper to simplify your views

I'm closing this.

[jgaskins]

@rafaelfranca Sort of. You'd still need to wrap those lis within a ul. Since the only elements within a ul should be lis, I figured this was a good abstraction by doing this at the list level. I did forget, however, that content_tag_for would iterate over a collection … or I would've used it in my code. :-)

Anyway, I appreciate you guys taking the time to look at this. I'll continue looking for other places to help out.

[drogus]

Anyway, I appreciate you guys taking the time to look at this. I'll continue looking for other places to help out.

Cool! :)