ContextExposer

Allows the Controller to exposes a Context object to the View. This Context object alone contains all the information passed to the View from the controller.

No more pollution of the View with content helper methods or even worse, instance variables.

The Context object will by default be an instance of ContextExposer::ViewContext, but you can subclass this baseclass to add you own logic for more complex scenarios. This also allows for a more modular approach, where you can easily share or subclass logic between different view contexts. Nice!

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'context_exposer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install context_exposer

Usage

Use the exposed method which takes a name of the method to be created on the ViewContext and a block with the logic.

Example:

class PostsController < ActionController::Base
  include ContextExposer::BaseController

  exposed(:post)  { Post.find params[:id] }
  exposed(:posts) { Post.find params[:id] }
end

You can also define your own subclass of ViewContext and designate an instance of this custom class as your "exposed" target, via view_context_classmethod.

Example:

class PostsController < ActionController::Base
  include ContextExposer::BaseController

  view_context_class :posts_view_context

  exposed(:post)  { Post.find params[:id] }
  exposed(:posts) { Post.find params[:id] }
end

class PostsViewContext < ContextExposer::ViewContext
  def initialize controller
    super
  end

  def total
    posts.size
  end

  def admin_posts
    return [] unless admin?
    posts.select {|post| post.admin? }
  end

  protected

  def current_user
    controller.current_user
  end

  def admin?
    current_user.admin?
  end  
end

This opens up some amazing possibilities to really put the logic where it belongs.The custom ViewContext would benefit from having the "admin" and "user" logic extracted either to separate modules or a custom ViewContext base class ;)

This approach opens up many new exciting ways to slice and dice your logic in a much better way, a new MVC-C architecture, the extra "C" for Context.

TODO

Add some useful subclasses of BaseController, that add some extra magic! Also add some basic modules to integrate with typical authentication solutions etc. Get inspiration from other similar gems, fx decent_exposure. Allow for integration between these different solutions.

ResourceController

It sould be nice to have a ResourceController to automatically set up the typical singular and plural-form resource helpers.

This would simplify the above PostsController example to this:

class PostsController < ActionController::Base
  include ContextExposer::ResourceController
end

Please help out :)

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request