Only show non blank attributes for a model in views in Rails

Question

Say I've a user model and there are bunch of user info, like email, birthdate, location, telephone number etc.

What's the simplest way of hiding the attributes that are blank?

I've doing something like

<% if blog.title.empty? -%>
 <p>Body: <%=h blog.body %></p>
 <p>Comments: <%=h blog.comments %></p>

<% elsif blog.body.empty? %>
 <p>Title: <%=h blog.title %></p>
 <p>Comments: <%=h blog.comments %></p>

<% else -%>
 <p>Title: <%=h blog.title %></p>
 <p>Body: <%=h blog.body %></p>
<% end -%> 

Clearly that is one ugly child. Other than using partials to render, is there a trick to only show non blank fields?

I've been trying to write a helpher method to make the view cleaner, but that's even more ugly.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

show_field_unless_empty(blog, :body, 'Body')

then, in blog_helper.rb

def show_field_unless_empty(model, field, title)
  render :partial => 'field', :locals => {:value => model.send(field), :title => title} if model.send(field)
end

then, in _field.html.erb

<p>
<%= title %>: 
<%= value %>
</p>

This seems fairly clean to me.

Answer 2

I would do it like this:

# blog_helper.rb
show_non_blank_field(label, value)
  "<p>#{label}: #{h value}</p>" if !value.blank?
end

and then in view:

<%= show_non_blank_field "Body", blog.body %>

and so on...

Of course you can use shorter helper name.

If you want to do it in if-else way, try this:

<% if !blog.title.blank? -%>
 <p>Title: <%=h blog.title %></p>
<% end %>

<% if !blog.body.blank? %>
 <p>Body: <%=h blog.body %></p>
<% end %>

<p>Comments: <%=h blog.comments %></p>