Learning Rails

BenchmarkHelper, CacheHelper, and CaptureHelper

All three of these classes contain methods that wrap around content in your templates. BenchmarkHelper is a class you’ll mostly want to use during development, when it may help you isolate code that’s taking the view a long time to run. CacheHelper and CaptureHelper are both for advanced development. While CacheHelper allows you to specify fragments of your views that will be stored for future reuse, and applied when the same call comes through, CaptureHelper lets you manually grab content that needs to be used again in the same view, probably to share content from the template with the layout:

benchmark

The benchmark method takes an optional message argument and an optional logging level argument (:debug, :info, :warn, or :error). It records how long the wrapped code takes to run. It requires a block argument, so it usually looks something like:

<% benchmark "It took this long:" do %>
 <%= my_long_method %>
<% end % >

The message and the length of time it takes to run will end up in the logs.

cache

The cache method lets you flag fragments of your view to be kept for caching. Like benchmark, cache wraps around the view code it’s meant to work on with a block argument:

<% cache do %>
  <%= my_repetitive_method_that_should_be_cached %>
<% end % >

You should only cache information that doesn’t change very often, but many HTML components are pretty stable.

capture

The capture method wraps around view code and stores its output to a variable. You can ...