Rails Best Practices

Move finder to named_scope

Complex finders in controller make application hard to maintain. Move them into the model as named_scope can make the controller simple and the complex find logics are all in models.

Use model association

Use model association to avoid assigning reference in controller.

Add model virtual attribute

Do not assign the model's attributes directly in controller. Add model virtual attribute to move the assignment to model.

Use model callback

Use model callback can avoid writing some logic codes in controller before or after creating, updating and destroying a model.

Replace Complex Creation with Factory Method

Sometimes you will build a complex model with params, current_user and other logics in controller, but it makes your controller too big, you should move them into model with a factory method

Move Model Logic into the Model

In MVC model, controller should be simple, the business logic is model's responsibility. So we should move logic from controller into the model.

model.collection_model_ids (many-to-many)

When you want to associate a model to many association models by checkbox on view, you should take advantage of model.collection_model_ids to reduce the code in controller.

Nested Model Forms

Use accepts_nested_attributes_for to make nested model forms much easier, this feature is provided by rails 2.3

Keep Finders on Their Own Model

According to the decoupling principle, model should do finders by itself, a model should not know too much about associations finders logic.

Love named_scope

named_scope is awesome, it makes your codes much more readable, you can also combine named_scope finders to do complex finders.