So for those of you that ran through the and created your very own random testimonial helper, I’m going to create another help to and were are going to make a few updates to our partial. First we have to do a few things:

  1. Rename our _random_testimonial.rhtml partial to _testimonial.rhtml
  2. Open our partial and remove the random_ from lines 2 and 3 leaving testimonial.[object]
  3. Open our application_helper.rb and edit out random_ on the line rendering the partial.
  4. Give the code a test

Everything should be just fine. All we have done is removed the usage of “random_” when it comes to using our partial. All the other code is the same here. So why would we do such a thing? Well… what if we had a page that we wanted to show all of our testimonials on? We already have a perfectly good partial view – we might as well take advantage of it. So in my testimonials_helper.rb I make another helper as such:

def all_testimonials
  @testimonials = Testimonial.find(:all)
  render(:partial => 'shared/testimonial', :collection => @testimonials)
end

Notice how I’m using the same partial here. Now in my testimonials controller I’ll just create a blank index method. The in my view testimonials/index.rthml I’ll just call the <%= all_testimonials %> helper.

Now I can use the both helpers with the same partial depending on the output I’m trying to active.

Now granted, we could use a method supporting polymorphism to DRY this up a little more, but I’ll let you experiment more with that yourself, when it comes to displaying testimonials on a page I don’t think I’m going to take the code THAT far.