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My Take on Decoration Methods in Ruby

One of the fundamentals of computing is that the way that information is presented on the screen is different to the way that it is stored or processed. Today's date, for instance, could be stored as a number (1620000000) or as a string (2021-05-03 00:00:00 +0000) or really any format. There will always be multiple different ways of storing information and this is fine. The challenge I want to talk about today though is organising the code for rendering this information in Ruby on Rails applications.

The "Rails Way" of doing this is with helper methods.

For example you might have a set of helpers defined as below:

module PersonHelper
  def person_full_name(person)
    "#{person.first_name} #{person.last_name}"
  end
  def person_birthday(person)
    return nil if person.birthday.blank?
    person.birthday.strftime '%m/%d/%Y'
  end
end

And then in your view code you would use these like so:

<h1>List of People and Their Birthdays</h1>
<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Full Name</th>
      <th>Birthday</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <% @people.each do |person| %>
      <tr>
        <td><%= person_full_name(person) %></td>
        <td><%= person_birthday(person) %></td>
      </tr>
    <% end %>
  </tbody>
</table>

This works but there's a few things to note.

  1. Rails helpers are global. So you have to give each helper a unique name. It can also be difficult to tell where functionality is coming from.
  2. Helpers are detached from the object they relate to. So you have to pass the object into the helper each time you use it.
  3. Helpers can end up duplicating functionality because it's difficult to share it. You could end up in a situation where helpers are guessing what kind of thing they're looking at and potentially acting incorrectly.

I also had the personal barrier of this solution just not 'feeling right'. I was new to a Rails codebase at the time and couldn't wrap my head around where all of the helpers were. The naming conventions weren't clear and I had a hard time looking at various components and figuring out if they were important or not.

So I hacked my own solution and made it available as a Ruby Gem.

Enter mini_decorator

On GitHub I describe it as:

Minimal decoration of Ruby objects using a decorate method. The idea is to create the thinnest possible layer of abstraction between presentational methods and 'work' methods. I was inspired by gems such as Draper, but felt like they were doing too much. Going back to the person name/birthday example above, with my solution the implementation would be something akin to this.

Define a person decorator (note, the heuristic similarity to helpers):

# app/decorators/person_decorator.rb
class PersonDecorator
  def full_name(person)
    "#{person.first_name} #{person.last_name}"
  end
  def birthday(person)
    return nil if person.birthday.blank?
    person.birthday.strftime '%m/%d/%Y'
  end
end

Join the decorator into the model:

# app/models/person.rb
class Person < ApplicationRecord
  # Imagine there's other model stuff in here such as relations or validation..
  decorate_with PersonDecorator
end

And finally, you would call the decorate method, passing in the attribute you want to render:

<h1>List of People and Their Birthdays</h1>
<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Full Name</th>
      <th>Birthday</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <% @people.each do |person| %>
      <tr>
        <td><%= person.decorate(:full_name) %></td>
        <td><%= person.decorate(:birthday) %></td>
      </tr>
    <% end %>
  </tbody>
</table>

I've found this system very useful for keeping decoration methods separate from model code but still organised and testable.

The other thing mini_decorator handles nicely is changing formats or choosing to format attributes that weren't being formatted before. If you call person.decorate(:email) (which isn't a decorator in our examples) then you will get the raw email attribute from the Person object. You can then later define a decorator for email which then is used instead of the raw value.

This system isn't perfect. But it feels better to me and I enjoy using it instead of polluting the global namespace, or mixing formatting code into model code.

Getting Started

Add mini_decorator to your Gemfile and then bundle install.

gem 'mini_decorator', '0.0.2'

You will also need to set up the decorate_with method in your model base class, usually called ApplicationRecord.

class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.abstract_class = true
  def self.decorate_with(decorator)
    include MiniDecorator.new(decorator.new)
  end
end

You can then create decorator classes and use them in your models. Hooray!

In addition to this, I usually create a DecoratorBase class that all decorators inherit from. Something like the following is a nice starting point:

class DecoratorBase
  def helpers
    ApplicationController.helpers
  end
  def routes
    Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
  end
  def localize(*args)
    I18n.localize(*args)
  end
  def updated_at(item)
    localize item.updated_at, format: :short
  end
  def updated_at_ago(item)
    "#{helpers.time_ago_in_words(item.updated_at)} ago"
  end
  def created_at(item)
    localize item.created_at, format: :short
  end
  def created_at_ago(item)
    "#{helpers.time_ago_in_words(item.created_at)} ago"
  end
end

Usage without Rails

The implementation of mini_decorator currently doesn't use any Rails-specific trickery, so you're perfectly safe using this library in non-Rails apps.

Implemantion Details

mini_decorator is actually only a few lines of Ruby code. You can see the whole mess below.

Note the extending from Module trick is because include only accepts modules but we still want to be able to pass a parameter into it. This allows us to write include MiniDecorator.new(MyFancyDecorator.new) in the class body of the object we're decorating.

class MiniDecorator < Module
  def initialize(decorator)
    define_method(:decorate) do |property|
      if decorator.respond_to? property
        decorator.public_send(property, self)
      elsif self.respond_to? property
        self.public_send(property)
      else
        raise NoMethodError.new(
          "No decorator or object method found for property: #{property}"
        )
      end
    end
  end
end

Hopefully this helps and if you ever end up using mini_decorator for anything, I would love to know!

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