This morning, on day two, Marcel Molina and Michael Koziarski did a little Best Practices session, a welcome change to the keynotes and sessions. It was very code-oriented. I did even take something out of it I didn’t know before. Though I wish it would’ve gone into a little bit more detail (which I actually wish for a lot of the other sessions as well, but more on this in a later post), it was something that you could relate to on a practical level.
I took some notes, without code though, and here they are:
- Keep the controllers skinny, keep logic that’s on the model’s low level out of the controller
- All that logic in the model makes it the fat model
- The controller should not deal with that logic, because it’s a different layer of abstraction
- Rough guide: 6 to 7 actions per controller, 6 to 7 lines per action
- Use association proxy methods. Add custom finders for associations to keep the association logic in the model and to represent the business logic more clearly
- Use explicit and short validation callbacks (e.g.
validate :make_sure_something_is_as_it_should_be) instead of just long validate methods. It’s easier to read and understand with_scopecan make code harder to read and is (apparently) used in situations where it isn’t necessary. It can be used to fake associations through proxies, e.g. to find objects that aren’t associated with an object through the database, but through some conditions, e.g. a smart group or a smart folder
Short, but sweet.