# More questions re: Presenter pattern & ActionView

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-questions-re-presenter-pattern-actionview/103441>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 6, 2007, 2:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-questions-re-presenter-pattern-actionview/103441 "2007-05-06T02:13:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dwfrank](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/f1d935/32.png) [@dwfrank](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dwfrank)\
**Post date:** [May 6, 2007, 2:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-questions-re-presenter-pattern-actionview/103441/1 "2007-05-06T02:13:46Z")

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We’ve been playing with the Presenter pattern a bit (as I asked about  
a few weeks ago) and now better understand the limitations without  
hacking deep into Rails.

We’re sticking closely with Jay Fields’ thoughts:

> **[Rails: Presenter Pattern](http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/03/rails-presenter-pattern.html)**
>
> The default architecture for Ruby on Rails, Model View Controller, can begin to break down as Controllers become bloated and logic begins to...

But since a Presenter isn’t an ActionView, we wind up with ERb that  
looks like this (from our Atom feed generator):

\<%= @presenter.make\_tag\_URI(url\_for(@presenter.entry)) %\>

instead of something nicer like this:

\<%= @presenter.entry\_id %\>

So what we want is to call ActionView helpers inside our Presenter  
methods. Thoughts on how to do this? Should we be making our  
Presenters subclasses of ActionView? Is there some other “down in the  
guts” way we should pursue?

We’ve looked at Simply Presentable and it seems to have the same  
issue.

thx,  
–dwf