Docunext

This is an example of Ruby's Enumerable class method group_by:

  1 %h2 Accounts
  2 -collection.group_by(&:type).each do |type, accounts|
  3   %h4=type
  4   -accounts.each do |a|
  5     %p=link_to a.name, self.send("#{a.type.underscore}_path",a)
  6
  7 =link_to "New", new_resource_path

Enumerable is truly an awesome class, actually - its a module! Which really exudes Ruby's prowess as a sweet gem of a programming language.

So what does group_by do? It converts an array of hashes (think ActiveRecord arrays) to an array of arrays containing hashes, sorted by one of the keys of the original hashes. This is often useful for sorting a collection of events by day, or in the above example, a collection of accounts by their type.

Do you have a cool example of enumerable's group_by function you'd like to share? I'd love to hear about it!