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Alternating Colors in Ruby/Rails

By Shahram Javey

Alternate Colors For displaying lists it is often useful to show the rows of the list in alternating colors. Ruby on Rails makes this really easy.

  1. Define the background colors using HTML style tag.

    2. <head>
    <style>
    .even { background: #99ccff; }
    .odd { background: #cccccc; }
    </style>
    </head>

  2. Add the class attribute that calls the cycle method to the HTML element that you use to describe the row, e.g., DIV or table row TR, …, for example:

    <% for track in @tracks %>
    <div class="<%= cycle('even','odd') %>" >
    <h3> 'show', :id => track %></h3>
    </div>
    <% end %>

That is it. Kudos to Ruby on Rails creators for making this so simple!

This entry was posted on May 31, 2007 at 2:12 am and is filed under Programming, Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Alternating Colors in Ruby/Rails”

  1. Tobias Hoellrich Says:
    May 31, 2007 at 3:39 pm | Reply

    Where does the “cycle” come from? Is that a Rails-builtin?

  2. sj Says:
    June 1, 2007 at 3:27 am | Reply

    Rails defines a framework in terms of APIs. It includes a template engine (similar to Java JSP), e.g. The APIs includes a number of very useful utility classes. One of them is called ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper and it includes a method called cycle.

  3. Josh Says:
    May 11, 2008 at 10:15 am | Reply

    perfect! i was using my own helper, no sense reinventing the wheel. -thanks!

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