I think it's important that every time (or nearly every time) I sit down to code that I try to do something I don't know how to do. I'm making good progress with using the code I've figured out and applying it to other similar things. For example, with my Manticore app I can use the same methods to create Items to also create Special Abilities and Spells.
But what I want is a way to sum totals from different columns in a table, then display that total in the view. I was messing around with the sum and count methods I found in the Rails API, but haven't quite gotten this figured out. The result is a pleasant headache, and that's what I'm going for. I can't just rest on what I know, I need to be stretching my boundaries when I code.
I think the end result will be I'll learn new things faster and be able to work around road blocks more quickly when they DO arise. My ultimate goal isn't simply to build this or that application; I want to understand how Rails applications work, how they go together and how they're built.
Also, I'm going to start blasting out my rails blog posts in Google+ in addition to Twitter, so if you're seeing this twice? Sorry about your luck!
sum and count won't be what you want, they execute queries on multiple rows in the database. I think you want multiple to sum multiple columns in a single row.
ReplyDeleteIIRC we did something like this in one of your models already, it probably looks like this:
(column_names - %w(id updated_at created_at user_id)).sum do |column|
send(column)
end