PART 1: SORTING THE LIST OF ALL MOVIES

Enhance application in the following way:

On the list of all movies page, the column headings for ‘Movie Title’ and ‘Release Date’ for a movie should be clickable links. Clicking one of them should cause the list to be reloaded but sorted in ascending order on that column. For example, clicking the ‘release date’ column heading should redisplay the list of movies with the earliest-released movies first; clicking the ‘title’ field should list the movies alphabetically by title. (For movies whose names begin with non-letters, the sort order should match the behavior of String#<=>.)

When the listing page is redisplayed with sorting-on-a-column enabled, the column header that was selected for sorting should appear with a yellow background, as shown below. You should do this by setting controller variables that are used to conditionally set the CSS class of the appropriate table heading to highlight, and pasting this simple CSS into app/assets/stylesheets/application.css file:

table#movies th.highlight {
  background-color: yellow;
}

The result should look something like this:

Hints and caveats:

• The current application views use the Rails-provided “resourceful routes” helper movies_path to generate the correct URI for the movies index page. You may find it helpful to know that if you pass this helper method a hash of additional parameters, those parameters will be parsed by Rails and available in the params[] hash.
• Databases are pretty good at returning collections of rows in sorted order according to one or more attributes. Before you rush to sort the collection returned from the database, look at the documentation for the ActiveRecord find and all methods and see if you can get the database to do the work for you.
• Don’t put code in your views! The view shouldn’t have to sort the collection itself—its job is just to show stuff. The controller should spoon-feed the view exactly what is to be displayed.

PART 2: FILTER THE LIST OF MOVIES

Enhance application as follows. At the top of the All Movies listing, add some checkboxes that allow the user to filter the list to show only movies with certain MPAA ratings:

When the Refresh button is pressed, the list of movies is redisplayed showing only those movies whose ratings were checked.

This will require a couple of pieces of code. We have provided the code that generates the checkboxes form, which you can include in the index.html.erb template:

<%= form_tag movies_path, :method => :get do %>
  Include:
  <% @all_ratings.each do |rating| %>
    <%= rating %>
    <%= check_box_tag "ratings[#{rating}]" %>
  <% end %>
  <%= submit_tag 'Refresh' %>
<% end %>

BUT, you have to do a bit of work to use the above code: as you can see, it expects the variable @all_ratings to be an enumerable collection of all possible values of a movie rating, such as ['G','PG','PG-13','R']. The controller method needs to set up this variable. And since the possible values of movie ratings are really the responsibility of the Movie model, it’s best if the controller sets this variable by consulting the Model. Hence, you should create a class method of Movie that returns an appropriate value for this collection.

You will also need code that figures out (i) how to figure out which boxes the user checked and (ii) how to restrict the database query based on that result.

Regarding (i), try viewing the source of the movie listings with the checkbox form, and you’ll see that the checkboxes have field names like ratings[G], ratings[PG], etc. This trick will cause Rails to aggregate the values into a single hash called ratings, whose keys will be the names of the checked boxes only, and whose values will be the value attribute of the checkbox (which is “1” by default, since we didn’t specify another value when calling the check_box_tag helper). That is, if the user checks the ‘G’ and ‘R’ boxes, params will include as one if its values ratings: {"G"=>"1", "R"=>"1"}. Check out the Hash documentation for an easy way to grab just the keys of a hash, since we don’t care about the values in this case.

Regarding (ii), you’ll probably end up replacing Movie.all in the controller method with Movie.find, which has various options to help you restrict the database query.

Hints and caveats:

• Make sure that you don’t break the sorted-column functionality you added previously! That is, sorting by column headers should still work, and if the user then clicks the “Movie Title” column header to sort by movie title, the displayed results should both be sorted but do not need to be limited by the checked ratings (we'll get to that in part 3).
• If the user checks (say) ‘G’ and ‘PG’ and then redisplays the list, the checkboxes that were used to filter the output should appear checked when the list is redisplayed. This will require you to modify the checkbox form slightly from the version we provided above.
• The first time the user visits the page, all checkboxes should be checked by default (so the user will see all movies). For now, ignore the case when the user unchecks all checkboxes—you will get to this in the next part.
• Don’t put code in your views! Set up some kind of instance variable in the controller that remembers which ratings were actually used to do the filtering, and make that variable available to the view so that the appropriate boxes can be pre-checked when the index view is reloaded.

PART 3: REMEMBER THE SORTING AND FILTERING SETTINGS

OK, so the user can now click on the “Movie Title” or “Release Date” headings and see movies sorted by those columns, and can additionally use the checkboxes to restrict the listing to movies with certain ratings only. And we have preserved RESTfulness, because the URI itself always contains the parameters that will control sorting and filtering.

The last step is to remember these settings. That is, if the user has selected any combination of column sorting and restrict-by-rating constraints, and then the user clicks to see the details of one of the movies (for example), when she clicks the Back to Movie List on the detail page, the movie listing should “remember” the user’s sorting and filtering settings from before.

(Clicking away from the list to see the details of a movie is only one example; the settings should be remembered regardless what actions the user takes, so that any time she visits the index page, the settings are correctly reinstated.)

The best way to do the “remembering” will be to use the session[] hash. The session is like the flash[], except that once you set something in the session[] it is remembered “forever” until you nuke the session with session.clear or selectively delete things from it with session.delete(:some_key). That way, in the index method, you can selectively apply the settings from the session[] even if the incoming URI doesn’t have the appropriate params[] set.

Hints and caveats

• If the user explicitly includes new sorting/filtering settings in params[], the session should not override them. On the contrary, the new settings should be remembered in the session.
• If a user unchecks all checkboxes, use the settings stored in the session[] hash (it doesn’t make sense for a user to uncheck all the boxes).
• To be RESTful, we want to preserve the property that a URI that results in a sorted/filtered view always contains the corresponding sorting/filtering parameters. Therefore, if you find that the incoming URI is lacking the right params[] and you’re forced to fill them in from the session[], the RESTful thing to do is to redirect_to the new URI containing the appropriate parameters. There is an important corner case to keep in mind here, though: if the previous action had placed a message in the flash[] to display after a redirect to the movies page, your additional redirect will delete that message and it will never appear, since the flash[] only survives across a single redirect. To fix this, use flash.keep right before your additional redirect.

HOW TO SUBMIT:

This is a completely optional task to those who are brave.

Deploy to Heroku by following the same process as we did on the lesson. You may also need to install Heroku toolbelt. The commands heroku create, heroku run, heroku logs, and heroku open may be useful.