Rails cycle helper

Posted by Stijn Pint on Aug 20, 2008

You all probably know the Rails helper function ‘cycle’, most commonly used to specify alternating classes when iterating over a collection :

<code class="ruby">
<% for item in @items %>
  <tr class=<%=cycle('even', 'odd')%>>
    <td><%= item.name %></td>
  </tr>
<% end %>

Well, apparently it is even more usefull than I thought,
and it was simply a matter of reading the rails documentation …

• You can cycle through more than two values: cycle(‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’, ‘and_more’)

• Sometimes you need multiple (nested) cycles in your views, for example, the normal alternating rows within a series of alternating tables.
  In that case you can pass the :name key to create ‘named cycles’
  Check the rails documentation for an example.

• And last bun not least: reset_cycle(‘cycle_name’)
  This makes sure that on each iteration, you will start again with your first value of the cycle list !

Maybe nothing special, but if you didn’t knew this yet, I’m sure you’ll like it :-)

Tail it !