Rails: Creating HTML in a Model - html

Question

I have a Publication model with a has_many relationship to Contributors. In the model, I have a method that's meant to create an html-ready by line:
def authors
authors = []
Contributor.where(:publication_id => self.id).each do |author|
authors << "link_to "+author.name+", Contributor.find("+author.id.to_s+")"
end
authors.to_sentence
end
In my view, I have the following line:
by <%= #publication.authors %>
But instead of rendering links, it renders the raw code, such as:
by link_to B, Contributor.find(1)
I've tried patching this by adding .html_safe to the end of #publication.authors, but to no avail. Is there a better way to transfer these links from the model to the view?

Answer 1

You're pushing strings into your authors array. It looks like valid code, so running eval on it should work. (Actually author.name will probably evaluate as an undefined symbol, so scratch that.)
A better way would be to use a has_many :authors, :model => 'Contributor' relationship on your Publication model, and you can bring up your array of Contributor objects by simply calling
#publication.authors
You'd want to iterate over these in your view like so:
<% #publication.authors.each do |author| %>
<%= link_to author.name, author %>
<% end %>
Note also that if you're displaying multiple Publication objects in a view this way, you'll want to use Publication.includes(:authors) in your controller when you're retrieving them to avoid the "N+1" problem.
Now, three lines of code doesn't seem very expensive to repeat, but there are ways to DRY that without violating the MVC pattern and cluttering your model:
Place the code to print a publication's authors into a partial, and call the partial as needed.
Place the code into a helper, include the helper and call the method as needed.
Here's a snippet from the source for to_sentence (you can adapt it for your needs, I think):
case length
when 0
""
when 1
self[0].to_s.dup
when 2
"#{self[0]}#{options[:two_words_connector]}#{self[1]}"
else
"#{self[0...-1].join(options[:words_connector])}#{options[:last_word_connector]}#{self[-1]}"
end
The full source can be found here.

Answer 2

It looks like you are trying to use haml syntax in your line. Maybe instead of using link_to, use an html hyperlink tag itself?
That being said, why are you having a model return html?
Edit: bdares answered already with what I was trying to say