Ruby/Rails - Sorting and Presenting a Large Amount of associated data

Question

I have a model that have a column for name and a column for categories. There are a large amount of names that I would like to list by category but I haven't figured out how to do it.

Currently in the view I have

<% for car in @cars %>
<%= car.name %>
<% end %>

which just presents this huge list of that is way too unwieldy. I'm using @car = Car.find(:all) in the controller to get the selection.

=> If there a way I can create some form of dynamic table where it groups all the car records by category and makes a new column for each category instance, with a listing of all the associated cars?

=> I'm also afraid that that might be too many columns so after 5 or so columns can I start a new row?

=> Should I do all this in the controller or the view?

Answer 1

Can you specify some sample values for the category column?

Depending on what you have stored you may be able to do this:

Car.find(:all).group_by(&:category)

Which will put the cars into an ordered hash indexed by the different category values.

<% @car_categories.sort.each do |category, cars| %>
    <h3><%= category %></h3>
    <% for cart in cars %>
       <p><%= interest.name %></p>
    <% end %>
<% end %>