Color coding table rows depending on an attribute

Rails
1

I need to show a different background color depending on the type of
comment posted. The type of comment is determined from a drop-down
selection. I figured the simplest way would be to do something like I
have below, but I can’t seem to get it to work:

>

I have 4-5 comment_types that need coloring, so I’ll probably move
this into a helper when I’m finished using some form of,

if comment_type == ‘Hiring Process’
puts “style = ‘background: red;’”
elsif comment_type == ‘Job Title Change’
puts “style = ‘background: green;’”
end

A similar application would be a help desk ticket system where high
priority tickets would be shown in a different color.

2

answer:

>

a helpful IRC chatter, named gnufied, told me that ‘puts’ cannot go in
a rhtml. So, I removed the puts and it worked.

3

First you need to read more docs about how the erb template language
works

  1. you don’t need the puts <%= code %> will print the output of the
    code on the page.

  2. is not necessary that you include “style =” in the ruby code since
    that part is the same in any case. You can do

;">
  1. instead of writing explicitly the colour you can just set a css
    class depending by the comment type, you just need to make the
    comment_type a valid string for a css class. By instance you can
    substitute spaces with _ and make everything lowercase
4

On Jul 9, 2007, at 16:26 , ebrad wrote:

end
There are two things I think you could do to clean this up:

  1. Don’t put so much code within HTML tags. A helper can definitely
    help with this.
  2. Use class attributes to give your tags semantic mean, and then use
    CSS to style them appropriately.

For 1), create a helper, something like (untested):

def class_attr_for(comment_type)
value = case comment_type
when ‘Hiring Process’
‘hiringProcess’
when ‘Job Title Change’
‘jobTitleChange’
end
class_attr = value ? %(class="#{value}") : ‘’
end

class_attr_for will return either class=“someValue” or “”

Then, you can call it in your view template like:

>

And in your CSS add something like:

.hiringProcess { background-color: red; }
.jobTitleChange { background-color: green; }

This gives you much better separation between your mark up and your
presentation, as well as cleaning up the view template.

Hope this helps.

Michael G.
grzm seespotcode net

5

Thanks Paolo,

Yeah, you are right, the puts thing was a blunder on my part. Also,
I’m aware about the CSS styling, but I just like to take baby steps
since this is my first rails app.

That was helpful!

cheers,

Brad Winchester

6

You are right…gotta keep it clean and DRY. I’ll definitely do this.

Thanks!