View helpers in Ruby on Rails - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using View Helpers in Rails

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Rails app that shows a list of books with their titles and authors. You want to keep your views clean by using a view helper to format the book display.

🎯 Goal: Create a view helper method that formats a book's title and author, then use it in the view to display each book nicely.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a helper method called formatted_book that takes a book object

The helper should return a string combining the book's title and author in this format: "Title by Author"

Use the formatted_book helper method inside the view to display each book

Ensure the view iterates over a list of books and calls the helper for each

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

View helpers are used in Rails apps to keep HTML views simple and reusable by moving formatting logic to helper methods.

💼 Career

Knowing how to write and use view helpers is essential for Rails developers to build maintainable and accessible web applications.

1

Set up the books data

Create a variable called @books in the controller with an array of hashes. Each hash should have keys :title and :author with these exact values: { title: 'The Hobbit', author: 'J.R.R. Tolkien' } and { title: '1984', author: 'George Orwell' }.

Ruby on Rails

# Create @books array with two hashes for books
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an array of hashes assigned to @books in your controller.

2

Add a view helper method

In the helper file, define a method called formatted_book that takes one parameter book. It should return a string combining the book's title and author in this exact format: "Title by Author" using string interpolation.

Ruby on Rails

# Define formatted_book helper method here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use string interpolation inside the helper method to combine title and author.

3

Use the helper in the view

In the view file, write a for loop that iterates over @books with the variable book. Inside the loop, call the helper method formatted_book(book) to display each book's formatted string inside a <li> element.

Ruby on Rails

   -->
  # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use ERB tags to embed Ruby code and call the helper inside the loop.

4

Add accessibility and semantic HTML

Wrap the list in a <section> with an aria-label attribute set to "Book list". This helps screen readers understand the content. Add this attribute to the existing <ul> or its container.

Ruby on Rails

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use semantic <section> and add aria-label for accessibility.