Chris, To start with, I would say that if you are displaying tabular data, then you *should* be using an HTML table. The whole "don't use tables" meme was more about mis-using them in a page layout context.
As to your question, I don't see a problem with looping through the collection multiple times. The biggest issue I could see is if the collection was too large to fit in memory, but that doesn't seem to be the case as you can't really have that many columns just from a UX perspective. Lastly, I've used will_filter [https://github.com/berk/will_filter] in the past and its got some nice features, if this is an admin-type feature you are building. (I'm not sure how hard it would be to make it do what you want, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.) Regards, John Lynch [email protected] On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:15 AM, Chris McCann <[email protected]> wrote: > SD Ruby, > > I'm wrestling with a view that displays data from a collection of model > objects in an HTML table with the data from each model instance shown in a > column. I sense there's an elegant way to do what I'm trying to do but I'm > at a loss as to how. > > The markup below shows how the end result should look. What I'm trying to > avoid is having to look through the collection of instances to build each > row. > > <div class="summary"> > <table> > <tr> > <th class="first"><a href="#">Summary</a></th> > <!-- loop through collection and write this data for each instance --> > <th><a href="#">201 First St.</a></th> > <th><a href="#">1133 Columbia St.</a></th> > </tr> > <tr> > <td class="first">Start Date</td> > > <!-- loop through collection and write this data for each instance --> > > <td>01/01/2010</td> > <td>01/01/2010</td> > </tr> > <tr> > <td class="first">Term</td> > > <!-- loop through collection and write this data for each instance --> > > <td>84 Months</td> > <td>84 Months</td> > </tr> > </table> > </div> > > > Is there a better, more Railsy approach that I'm just not seeing? The > actual table is much more complex than what's shown here so I don't want to > go the CSS-only no table route unless there's a really nice solution that > entails not using tables. > > Cheers, > > Chris > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
