2006/4/18, travis laduke [email protected]:
it really bugs me that they are pretty much the same methods
The first thing you need to do, is work out what is different between
the two methods.
As you wrote them, I see these differences:
@company vs @person
Person vs Company
‘Person’ vs ‘Company’
params[:company] vs params[:person]
Next, you need to work out what the “best” code would look like for
inside the two actions. Something like this might be good:
def edit_company
@company = find_or_redirect(Company)
end
def edit_person
@person = find_or_redirect(Person)
end
So, what does find_by_id_or_redirect look like? If we can work out
each of the differences simply by knowing which Class we’re talking
about, then we can use the two methods above.
The first difference is which instance variable to assign to. As you
can see in the two methods above, I’m setting the instance variables
by whatever is returned from find_or_redirect, so that’s easy.
Next, Person vs Company. That’s easy too, as I’m supplying it as an
argument.
Next, ‘Person’ vs ‘Company’, used in your flash message. That’s just
the name of the class as a string, so we can get that using
Person.to_s.
Lastly, params[:company] vs params[:person]. Here, it’s the name of
the class, converted to lowercase (downcase), and then converted into
a symbol. So we can do: Person.to_s.downcase.to_sym to get the symbol.
Bringing that all together, we get:
def edit_company
@company = find_or_redirect(Company)
end
def edit_person
@person = find_or_redirect(Person)
end
protected
def find_or_redirect(klass)
item = klass.find(params[:id])
klass_symbol = klass.to_s.downcase.to_sym
if request.post? and item.update_attributes(params[klass_symbol])
flash[:notice] = “#{klass.to_s} was successfully edited.”
redirect_to :action => ‘show’, :id => item
end
return item
end
And that should work fine 
hth,
Douglas
