#Spectabular

Spectabular provides a helper method which turns ActiveModel resources into tabular displays. It provides some minimal customization options.

Spectabular 2 is only compatible with Rails 3.0 and above. It has been tested on Rails 3.1 and 3.2.

If you are using Rails 2, please use Spectabular 1 (Rails-2 branch).

In your Rails application, add the following line to your Gemfile

  gem 'spectabular', :git => 'git://feldpost@github.com/feldpost/spectabular.git'

Run bundle install.

Assuming you have this in your controller:

@articles = Article.all

In your views:

  table_for :articles

Generates table with all content columns.

  table_for :articles, :title, :description

Only shows the title and description attributes.

  table_for :articles,
            "Title" => :helper_method,
            "Description" => Proc.new {|record| record.description }

You can specify a helper method or block to be called. Both block and helper method take one argument, the record being passed to the table row.

Because Hashes in Ruby 1.8 are not ordered, in the above example the column order is not guaranteed. Thus, you can number your columns as such:

  table_for :articles,
            "1-Title" => :helper_method,
            "2-Description" => Proc.new {|record| record.description }

The numeration markers are removed and column order is maintained. This is not necessary if you are using Ruby 1.9.