Simple Rails Snippets - Bradley Priest

Simple Rails Snippets 13 Jan 2011

There has been a bit of development around content micro-management in the Rails ecosystem lately.

Thoughtbot just released their hosted service Copycopter. Quickleft brought out the Regulate gem.

It’s really good to see some simple solutions to what should really be a simple problem.

For me, even these seem a bit much, if you just want to add really basic snippet management it really isn’t that hard to from scratch. I can’t promise you this is the best way to do it, but it works well for me, comments are greatly appreciated.

Start by creating a new Snippet model. I’m just going to use Ryan Bates’ amazing nifty-generators. All you really need is a name and content. I’m throwing in a status for drafts as well.

$ rails generate nifty:scaffold Snippet title:string snippet:text status:string

Now let’s set up the basics: A simple helper

snippet_helper.rb

def snippet_for(name, default = nil)
  Rails.cache.fetch("snippet::"+name.to_s)) do
    Snippet.published.find_by_title(name.to_s) || default || "Snippet for #{name.to_s} missing"
  end
end

alias_method :s, :snippet_for

In the snippet helper I’m defining a snippet_for method:

This takes the name of the snippet, and an optional default value. Make sure you use descriptive names here, you’ll thank yourself later.

The helper will try to find a value first by searching the rails cache, followed by the snippet database, followed by the optional default and lastly will show a snippet not found message.

In the last line I’m aliasing snippet_for(…) to s(..) just for brevity

models/snippet.rb

class Snippet < ActiveModel
  after_save :clear_cache
  scope :published where(:status => 'published')

  def to_s
    snippet
  end

  def clear_cache
    Rails.cache.delete("snippet::"+title)
  end
end

The snippet model contains a simple published scope. And an after_save callback to allow for snippet updating. If you starting enhancing your snippet model you’ll probably want to implement a Rails sweeper.

Now in your code when you need a snippet

= snippet_for(:call_to_action, 'Click Me')
= s(:call_to_action, 'Click Me')

Tags:

rails 6