Ruby on Rails

Hi!

I'm creating a bar graph using Morris.js. What I'm showing in the graph is dates on the X-axis and the number of times an event has occurred on that date on the Y-axis.

So, I followed Ryan Bates episode on Morris.js: http://railscasts.com/episodes/223-charts-graphs-revised (It's a PRO episode so I will explain more).

I created a class method in my model that fetches all records, groups by date and count the occurrences. This method is called by a helper method from my view. The helper method loops over the date range and checks the number of occurrences for that date and adds it to a hash (dates that doesn't exist in the database is set to 0).

This hash is then simply added to my view as a data attribute (data-events="{....}") which I'm fetching using JS and adding to the graph.

The questions I have are:

- Is this a good approach?

- Would it be better to add another action to my controller and have that return the data needed as JSON and call just this using javascript?

What are the benefits/drawbacks of the different approaches?