14 List Notes

Listing Notes

Rather than having a pages#index action, we'll show a list of notes in the sidebar on every page when we're logged in.

Let's add a before_action to NotesController to grab all notes and assign the collection to an instance variable.

app/controller/notes_controller.rb

before_action :load_notes

app/controller/notes_controller.rb

def load_notes
  @notes = Note.all
end

We'll use this instance variable in a partial.

_app/views/notes/list.html.erb

<% if @notes.present? %>
  <ul id="notes">
    <% @notes.each do |note| %>
      <li>
        <%= content_tag :div, note.title, class: 'note-title' %>
        <%= content_tag :div, note.body_html.to_s.html_safe, class: 'note-body' %>
      </li>
    <% end %>
  </ul>
<% end %>

Let's render this partial in the sidebar in the application layout, which only logged in users will ever see. We'll get rid of the <div class="well"> element while we're at it.

app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<nav id="sidebar">
  <%= render 'notes/list' %>
</nav>

For the moment, this list isn't clickable. We'll fix that shortly. Meanwhile, let's make a work-in-progress commit.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "WIP List all notes in the sidebar."