Textilizing multiple fields at once

Textile is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I use it on just about every text area of every Rails application I build. In the database I typically have a field for the raw text and a field for the marked-up, textilized text (one for editing, one for displaying). And up until recently I’ve only had at most one field per model that needed to be “textilized.” Well the helper I was using will no longer suffice, so I’ve implemented a new version. It’s now a class method and can accept multiple columns at once, as well as a column suffix (defaults to _html). Here’s how it works:

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# Implied DB columns:
# - notes,       notes_html
# - description, description_html
# - summary,     summary_html

class FilledWithText < ActiveRecord::Base
  textilize :notes, :description, :summary
end

However, if there is some sort of conflict or need to have the columns be something other than [column]_html, you can just pass the suffix as a key/value pair at the end of the parameter list. Also, you can give the key any name you’d like for readability sake—it only really cares about the value…

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# Implied DB columns:
# - about,   about_source
# - article, article_source

class MoreText < ActiveRecord::Base
  textilize :about, :article, :suffix => 'source'
  # or
  textilize :about, :article, :ending_of_textilized_columns => 'source'
end

It’s been quite handy for me so far. I’m sure the implementation isn’t perfect, but here’s what I came up with:

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def textilize(*columns)
  methods = []
  suffix  = columns.last.is_a?(Hash) ? columns.pop.values.last : 'html'

  columns.each do |column|
    define_method "#{column}_to_html" do
      self["#{column}_#{suffix}"] = RedCloth.new(self[column] || '').to_html
    end
    methods << "#{column}_to_html".to_sym
  end

  before_save *methods
end

If you use textile, it’s worth doing something like this, as it makes it so much easier to convert and self-document textilized columns. Just stick it in a module to use across all of your models.

Of course, after the fact I realized there was a much better solution. I should have known to check first. Oh well, it’s still good for me to cook my own soup, so to speak.