Rails View Helpers With Haml

Our marketting department recorded a lot of tutorial videos at last week. They want to link to related videos at related pages. Let’s do this with a clever way.

This is our sample haml code block which shows icons and link to videos. As you see there are duplicate codes.

- content_for :toolbar do
  = link_to 'Vimeo',   'https://vimeo.com/92406233',           target: '_blank'
  = link_to 'Youtube', 'http://www.youtube.com/user/Bulutfon', target: '_blank'

There is a helpers directory in app folder and we write our custom view helper there.

app/
   assets/
   controllers/
   helpers/  <-- HERE
   mailers/
   models/
   views/

Let’s create our custom helper.

# app/helpers/app_custom_helper.rb
module AppCustomHelper 
  def video_link title, url
    capture_haml do
      haml_concat link_to title, url, target: '_blank'
    end
  end
end

Now you can use view helper in your haml files like

- content_for :toolbar do
  = video_link 'Vimeo',   'https://vimeo.com/92406233'
  = video_link 'Youtube', 'http://www.youtube.com/user/Bulutfon'

If you want to make global change, you just modify the helper file. For example add btn btn-default css class all video links.

# app/helpers/app_custom_helper.rb
module AppCustomHelper 
  def video_link title, url
    capture_haml do
      haml_concat link_to title, url, target: '_blank', class: 'btn btn-default'
    end
  end
end

If we don’t use rails view helpers, we should add class: 'btn btn-default' code to all page.

Resource

lab2023's blog posts

Onur Özgür ÖZKAN

April 22, 2014

Rails View Helpers With Haml