Draper adds a nicely-separated object-oriented layer of presentation logic to your Rails apps. Previously, this logic might have been tangled up in procedural helpers, or contributing to your fat models' weight problems. Now, you can wrap your models up in decorators to organise - and test - this layer of your app much more effectively.
## Overview
With Draper, your `Article` model has a corresponding `ArticleDecorator`. The decorator wraps the model, and deals only with presentational concerns. In the controller, you simply decorate your article before handing it off to the view.
```ruby
# app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
def show
@article = Article.find(params[:id]).decorate
end
```
In the view, you can use the decorator in exactly the same way as you would have used the model. The difference is, any time you find yourself needing to write a helper, you can implement a method on the decorator instead. For example, this helper:
```ruby
# app/helpers/articles_helper.rb
def publication_status(article)
if article.published?
"Published at #{article.published_at.strftime('%A, %B %e')}"
Notice that the `published?` method can be called even though `ArticleDecorator` doesn't define it - thanks to `delegate_all`, the decorator delegates missing methods to the source model. However, we can override methods like `published_at` to add presentation-specific formatting, in which case we access the underlying model using the `source` method.
You might have heard this sort of decorator called a "presenter", an "exhibit", a "view model", or even just a "view" (in that nomenclature, what Rails calls "views" are actually "templates"). Whatever you call it, it's a great way to replace procedural helpers like the one above with "real" object-oriented programming.
Decorators are the ideal place to:
* format dates and times using `strftime`,
* define commonly-used representations of an object, like a `name` method that combines `first_name` and `last_name` attributes,
* mark up attributes with a little semantic HTML, like turning a `url` field into a hyperlink.
And run `bundle install` within your app's directory.
## Writing decorators
Decorators inherit from `Draper::Decorator`, live in your `app/decorators` directory, and are named for the model that they decorate:
```ruby
# app/decorators/article_decorator.rb
class ArticleDecorator <Draper::Decorator
# ...
end
```
### Generators
When you generate a resource with `rails generate resource Article`, you get a decorator for free! But if the `Article` model already exists, you can run `rails generate decorator Article` to create the `ArticleDecorator`.
### Accessing helpers
Procedural helpers are still useful for generic tasks like generating HTML, and as such you can access all this goodness (both built-in Rails helpers, and your own) through the `helpers` method:
```ruby
class ArticleDecorator <Draper::Decorator
def emphatic
helpers.content_tag(:strong, "Awesome")
end
end
```
To save your typing fingers it's aliased to `h`. If that's still too much effort, just pop `include Draper::LazyHelpers` at the top of your decorator class - you'll mix in a bazillion methods and never have to type `h.` again... [if that's your sort of thing](https://github.com/garybernhardt/base).
### Accessing the model
Decorators will delegate methods to the model where possible, which means in most cases you can replace a model with a decorator and your view won't notice the difference. When you need to get your hands on the underlying model the `source` method is your friend (and its aliases `model` and `to_source`):
Ok, so you've written a sweet decorator, now you're going to want to put it in action! A simple option is to call the `decorate` method on your model:
```ruby
@article = Article.first.decorate
```
This infers the decorator from the object being decorated. If you want more control - say you want to decorate a `Widget` with a more general `ProductDecorator` - then you can instantiate a decorator directly:
Draper guesses the decorator used for each item from the name of the collection decorator (`ArticlesDecorator` becomes `ArticleDecorator`). If that fails, it falls back to using each item's `decorate` method. Alternatively, you can specify a decorator by overriding the collection decorator's `decorator_class` method.
Some pagination gems add methods to `ActiveRecord::Relation`. For example, [Kaminari](https://github.com/amatsuda/kaminari)'s `paginate` helper method requires the collection to implement `current_page`, `total_pages`, and `limit_value`. To expose these on a collection decorator, you can simply delegate to the `source`:
The `delegate` method used here is the same as that added by [Active Support](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Module.html#method-i-delegate), except that the `:to` option is not required; it defaults to `:source` when omitted.
The `delegate_all` call at the top of your decorator means that all missing methods will delegated to the source. If you want to strictly control which methods are called in your views, you can choose to only delegate certain methods.
If you need to pass extra data to your decorators, you can use a `context` hash. Methods that create decorators take it as an option, for example
```ruby
Article.first.decorate(context: {role: :admin})
```
The value passed to the `:context` option is then available in the decorator through the `context` method.
If you use `decorates_association`, the context of the parent decorator is passed to the associated decorators. You can override this with the `:context` option:
When you're using `decorates_association`, Draper uses the `decorate` method on the associated record (or each associated record, in the case of a collection association) to perform the decoration. If you want use a specific decorator, you can use the `:with` option:
For a collection association, you can specify a `CollectionDecorator` subclass, which is applied to the whole collection, or a singular `Decorator` subclass, which is applied to each item individually.
### Scoping associations
If you want your decorated association to be ordered, limited, or otherwise scoped, you can pass a `:scope` option to `decorates_association`, which will be applied to the collection before decoration:
```ruby
class ArticleDecorator <Draper::Decorator
decorates_association :comments, scope: :recent
end
```
### Breaking with convention
If, as well as instance methods, you want to proxy class methods to the model through the decorator (including when using `decorates_finders`), Draper needs to know the model class. By default, it assumes that your decorators are named `SomeModelDecorator`, and then attempts to proxy unknown class methods to `SomeModel`. If your model name can't be inferred from your decorator name in this way, you need to use the `decorates` method:
```ruby
class MySpecialArticleDecorator <Draper::Decorator
decorates :article
end
```
You don't need to worry about this if you don't want to proxy class methods.
### Making models decoratable
Models get their `decorate` method from the `Draper::Decoratable` module, which is included in `ActiveRecord::Base` and `Mongoid::Document` by default. If you're using another ORM, or want to decorate plain old Ruby objects, you can include this module manually.
## Contributors
Draper was conceived by Jeff Casimir and heavily refined by Steve Klabnik and a great community of open source [contributors](https://github.com/drapergem/draper/contributors).
