Refactoring Tip: Use the View Object pattern in Rails for building a user profile page

Medium.com’s user profile shows all of the users posts, their followers and what they have highlighted.

I’d imagine their data model works like this. They have a User model, a Post model, a FollowerAssociationModel and a Highlights model.

For their profile page, they bring in data from several different sources.

When building out a users profile page in your app, it might feel tempting to create an entirely new model for it. But I'm generally very wary of creating a model for something so non-specific. It can quickly become a general "throw everything here" model.

Use the View Object Pattern

The best way I have found to do this in Rails is to use the View Object Pattern (aka Presenter Object). You can read more about it here: 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models (search view object).

First, you'd create a class that encapsulates all the data you want shown on the profile page.

Something like this:

class UserProfile
  attr_reader :user

  def initialize(user)
    @user = user
  end

  def tagline
    # example of some html conversion
    @tagline ||= ConvertTagsToLinks.run(user.tagline)
  end

  def posts
    @posts ||= user.posts.order_by_featured_date
  end

  def followers
    @follows ||= user.followers.ordered_by_popularity
  end

  ## ect...
end

(a bit of a contrived example, but hopefully you get the idea)

Then this makes it really easy to have one nice clean object to access in your controllers and views.

# some controller
def show
  @user = User.find(params[:id)
  @user_profile = UserProfile.new(@user)

  # render a view...
end

Then in your view, you are able to easily access your view object.

<p class="tagline"><%= @user_profile.tagline %></p>

Using this pattern keeps your abstractions very explicit. This pattern is easy to write tests for and helps keep User Profile code out of your models.

Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you.