Rails: help refactoring controller

Question

Hi

I have a controller that I want to refactor. This controller basically renders a formatted XML document.

The controller does 4 main things.

1. It get records from a DB
2. It reads a static xml file from rails_root/config
3. It iterates through DB records and gsubs the XML doc using the DB data
4. It renders the XML document as :text

My question is:

Where is the correct place for 2/3 to happen within in the Rails framework? It seems to me that they shouldn't be in the controller.

I'm on Rails 2.3

Cheers

Answer 1

I don't know what best practice is, but in my case I'd do 1, 2, and 3 in one class method in the model. I'd create a model method that takes in the name of the base XML file.

So I'd do something like this... (CAVEAT: I'm not 100% sure about this being syntactically correct, I'm still kind of new to Rails)

# app/models/mymodel.rb
class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base

  # ...

  def self.formatXml(xml_base)
    dataRecords = MyModel.find(:whatever) # step 1

    # open the XML and read it into a string, this is step 2
    # take the XML string, do the appropriate gsubs

    return my_xml_string;
  end
end

# app/controllers/mycontroller.rb
class MyController < ActionController::Base

  # ...

  def myAction
    formattedXml = MyModel.formatXml(whateverXmlFileName)

    render :text => formattedXml
  end
end