If else statements in .html.erb in views

Question

In rails, I often run into the situation where inside the views I'll do something like

<% if @some_condition_previusly_established_in_a_controller %>  <div class="one">123</div> <% else %>  <div class="two">something else</div> <% end %> 

It looks a bit cluttery. Is this an acceptable way of working with views or not?

Answer 1

Unless you can think of a way to re-write this as a helper method, you're basically stuck with it looking kind of ugly. That's just how ERB is, as it was intended to be a minimal way of injecting Ruby into an otherwise plain-text template, not as something necessarily streamlined or elegant.

The good news is a syntax-highlighting editor will usually make your <% ... %> ERB blocks look visually different from your HTML so that can dramatically improve readability.

It's also why other representations like HAML have been created where that syntax is a lot less cluttered:

- if some_condition_previusly_established_in_a_controller   .one 123 - else   .two something else 

Answer 2

For one or two such conditional logic in your views, I guess its fine but when your code gets bigger and you have multiple if..else..end and looks "cluttery", I think you should look at implementing "Presenter Pattern" which greatly cleans up your views by separating your logic to Presenters.

Here is a great tutorial I followed from Ryan Bates in his Rails Casts series on "Presenter Patterns from scratch". http://railscasts.com/episodes/287-presenters-from-scratch.