/partial-locals-lab

Primary LanguageRubyOtherNOASSERTION

Partials with Locals Lab

Now that we learned about locals, let's refactor our old codebase and add a couple new features using this new tool.

Objectives

  1. Use the locals keyword
  2. Understand why using instance variables in partials is bad
  3. Use a partial to iterate over a collection, passing in a local
  4. Use a partial from another controller with a local

Overview

So your team's lead engineer looked over the codebase and asked you to not refer to instance variables in your partials but rather to pass through local variables. That way, your code will be more explicit about its dependencies when it calls the partial.

Also, the lead engineer asked for a couple new features.

The first is that we display all students on the classroom show page instead of singling out the oldest student with a special note. The engineer thinks this isn't very polite.

Second, they also want to add some search functionality so that a user can search for a student by name. They'll type the name in in a form field and we'll use the power of ActiveRecord to find matching data. It's OK if other students with similar names are returned in the search results.

Instructions

  1. Refactor the _form.html.erb partial to accept the argument to the form_for helper as a local. You'll also need to change the new.html.erb and edit.html.erb views as well.

  2. Refactor the _student.html.erb partial to pass through each rendered student as a local.

  3. On the classroom show page, iterate through each classroom's students and display each of them using our _student.html.erb partial with locals.

  4. Create a _classroom.html.erb partial to display classroom information on the classroom show page.

  5. Add in search functionality such that users can type in a student name or fragment of a student name and and see all matching results on the students index page. The results should be displayed by rendering a students/_student.html.erb partial.

To start on this last deliverable, add a search form using the form_tag helper to your students index page:

<%= form_tag students_path, method: :get do %>
  <p>
    <%= text_field_tag :query, params[:query] %>
    <%= submit_tag "Search", name: nil %>
  </p>
<% end %>

When this form is submitted, it will make a GET request to /students. The text from the query will be available in the params hash. From here, you'll need to use that query to find students using a "fuzzy" or "wildcard" search in the controller in order to create the set of matches.

For the next step, you'll need to write a flexibly matching (or "wildcard") query in ActiveRecord that follows the form: Student.where("name LIKE ?", "%query%"). For example, Student.where("name LIKE ?", "%M%") will return all students with an "M" anywhere in their name. Remember, your query will come from the params hash.

Once you have the search functionality coded, you should be able to visually test it by visiting http://localhost:3000/students?query=search_text.

Resources