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Rails tip: Scaffold lists more usable

You might wonder what a code example is doing here in a blog about usability and web standards. As you might know, Thomas and I are both web developers, and we’re really obsessed about making usable web applications.

What better way than to share code for things that make web apps more usable. Thomas has already shared code that we use for this blog to make it more usable (and I know there is more to come!).

This tip is regarding scaffolding code in Ruby on Rails (which we use in Capgemini). The problem is that usually your data model contains so many attributes, that it wrecks the list view totally. There are so many horisontal columns in the table that it’s impossible to see all columns on the screen, you get horizontal scroll. And even worse: The actions (view, edit, destroy) are completely hidden.

From usability, we know that we should assist the user’s focus on what’s important on this page. In a list view, the primary task is to choose the right row to work on. To support this, we should hide all columns irrelevant to the task.

Ruby on Rails

In Ruby on Rails, I did that by customizing the columns I wanted to view.

In the model I add a new method self.simple_content_columns:

[code lang=”ruby”]
def self.simple_content_columns
column_names = %w{company_number name address}
columns = []
for c in self.content_columns do
columns < < c if column_names.include?(c.name) end columns end [/code] Then in the list view I change from "model.content_columns" to "model.simple_content_columns" in the file: file "_list.rhtml": [code lang="ruby"]

< % for column in Company.simple_content_columns %>

< % end %>

< % for company in @companies %>

< % for column in Company.simple_content_columns %>

< % end %>
[…]
[/code]
The only thing I modified in the view file was to replace Company.content_columns with Company.simple_content_columns.

It’s not particularly pretty, but it works. If you want something more fancy, you could take a look at the “scaffolding extension” plugin for Rails. I look forward to your improvements/suggestions/comments.

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This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 11:56 (GMT-1) and is filed under Code, Ruby on Rails, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Rails tip: Scaffold lists more usable”

  1. Rohit Kataria Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 23:49 (GMT-1)

    Great suggestion. Just can’t thank you enough.

    Regards
    Rohit

< %= column.human_name %>
< %=h company.send(column.name) %>