As we are approaching towards Ruby on Rails, this past project week was all about Sinatra and ActiveRecord. Along my way to make a basic sinatra web app, I’ve had the pleasure to meet Bootstrap too. Don’t get me wrong, all of these frameworks and interfaces are very powerful and albeit makes a software developers life so much easier! I was amazed the way these tools simplifies a lot of the crucial tasks! Take password validations for an instance. When I didn’t know better, I thought what kind of magic are these programmers doing that their programs know that I haven’t used a symbol for my password! Then I’ve got my hands on ActiveRecord and it’s awesome validation options! But I am gonna write today about how I made a navbar with hidden items using the ERB.
When we talk about responsive functionality of a webpage, immediately Javascript comes to mind. So when this project came along I was thinking that I will probably have to build a very static site since I don’t know Javascript. But then, came along ERB or Embedded Ruby. ERB lets you embed Ruby code in your html and it is very powerful. For my project I decided to make a navbar with collapsible menu items which would be changing depending on if the user is logged in or not.
I’ve used bootstrap to achieve the navbar and it’s contents. Then used ERB to make it more dynamic in a way that when a user logs in he can hav access to more nav items.
To achieve this function, first I made sure to enable and set sessions from my Application Controller and then in my User model I set the session[:id] to the user’s id upon logging in. Then I wrote a helper method in my Application Controller which sets a current user based on the session id if the user logs in and if there is a session[:id] is present. After all these ERB just made it too easy. All I had to do was to implement a simple if and else statments in my html file and based on the current_user condition my navbar became dynamic!
In times I felt lost but with the awesome resources that are available through Flatiron School Faculty, my peers and the internet , in the end this turned out to be a really interesting project, I had the chance to learn a ton of materials and I am certainly looking forward for the next one!
