Rails - Ruby: lesson in MVC

So turns out if you apply MVC correctly you save yourself from lots of unnecessary objects!

Originally I thought I needed a Board --> Panel --> Story. But as mentioned last post, using poro instead of ActiveRecord was getting 'interesting', as I had decided I didn't need any state for Board and Panel. As I was fixing tests... suddenly realized how all this was very unnecessary work:

The better solution is to create a BoardController, and then define the panels as simple attributes of that controller that reference the appropriate collection of stories:

class BoardController < ApplicationController
 def show
  @backlog = Story.find :all, :conditions => 'state IS NULL'
   respond_to do |format|
    format.html # show.html.erb
    format.xml { render :xml => @stories }
    end
  end
end

Now instead of needing to keep a bunch of keys, names in alignment between the view, board, panel objects... I just have simple associations. Each named collection I want is an attribute in the board controller, available to the view. The view simply needs to render each attribute appropriately. This approach also seem to have simplified my views, since now I just have the 'board' view, and a '_story' partial view to render each collection element.