View Hints

This API is used internally in Hobo, for example in the Rapid tag library, to create a user interface according to your declarations. That’s really all there is to it.

It’s important to note that the view-hints mechanism is entirely optional, and may not be appropriate for all applications (especially larger applications). Everything you can do with view-hints can be done with much more flexibility by defining DRYML tags and page templates. What view-hints give you is a way to achieve common UI customisations very quickly and easily.

Child relationships

Many web applications arrange the information they present in a hierarchy. By declaring a hierarchy using the children declaration, Hobo can give you a much better default user interface.

At present, the children declaration only influences Rapid’s show-page – it governs the display of collections of <card> tags embedded in the show-page. If you declare a single child collection, e.g.:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  ....
  children :recipes

end

Parent relationships

Defining a child relationship also defines a parent relationship on the first child. If this is not sufficient or correct, you may explicitly define the parent relationship:

class Recipe < ActiveRecord::Base
  view_hints.parent :user
end

To remove the automatic relationship, you can pass nil:

parent nil

The collection of the user’s recipes will be added to the main content of users/show.

You can declare additional child relationships. The order is significant, with the first in the list being the “primary collection”. For example:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  children :recipes, :questions, :answers

end

With this declaration, the user’s show-page will be given an aside section (sidebar), in which cards for the questions and answers collections are displayed.

The API

The view-hints API is used internally by Hobo Rapid. You may not ever need to use it yourself. For completeness it is documented here.

The view-hints for any model can be accessed using the view_hints method:

MyModel.view_hints

That will return the view-hints class from which the hints can be accessed. Each of the declaration methods can be called without arguments to retrieve the declared values. e.g.

>> BlogPost.view_hints.model_name
=> "Post"

Helpers

The following view helpers are defined to simplify access to view-hints information during rendering:

• this_field_name – returns the view-hints translated name of the field currently referenced by DRYML’s this_field. That is, the field of the current context

• this_field_help – returns the translated help text associated with the field currently in context.