May be my question it's a little weird for RoR developers, but i'm new in Ruby on Rails, and i only discover this world now - there is some dependencies in views names and definitions in controller?
If i have, for example, view called "parse-public-profile.html.erb" , should i add in controller definition with exactly this name? i mean "def parse-public-profile ... end"
I know, that this is basic, but simply i try to understand how controller knows, what views i have now; what i should change, if i will add/change-name of view, or how to define view, if in my "views" folder, i have another folder, for ex. "clients"
Thanks!
Rails follows REST this means methods as index, show, edit, update, destroy etc. are very common in an Rails controller. When you have a custom action(method) however on your controller Rails will look for the corresponding view file, so for example:
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def another_action
end
end
will try to render: app/views/users/another_action.html.erb
There is also the concept of partials which are normally called within a view file f.e. in users/index.html.erb
<% render :partial => 'form' %>
will try to render: app/views/users/_form.html.erb (note the _)
An in depth explanation can be found in the Rails guides
You can also use:
def index
render :template => "users/parse-public-profile"
end
The :template over rides the default file that Rails would have rendered.
For more info, see the Rails Guide on Layouts and Rendering at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html.
Related
I am using Rails 5 and I want to use shared files in my project. I have searched the web about this, and I got some results as follow:
For Rails 3
app/views/shared
For Rails 4
app/views/application
but there was nothing for Rails 5.
I am talking about the standard; is there any specific location to add common view files in Rails 5, just as we do in other frameworks? Like in Laravel there is a layout folder?
All the people telling you that there is no "standard location" for common view files are correct. However, if you want to ask Rails where it would go looking for a partial file if you attempted to render one on the view, just take any view file you have and render a partial you know doesn't exist.
If you have, say, a UsersController with a view structure that looks something like app/view/users, and you add the following on any view there:
<%= render 'foo' %>
You'll likely get an error that says something like:
Missing partial users/_foo, application/_foo
That means that whenever you attempt to render a partial by just it's name without any path information, Rails will look for it
first under the view directory for the current controller, in this case users
then under the application directory
So, I guess then you could say that the "default location" in Rails for common view files is under the application directory.
It's possible to add to this in order to create your app's own "standard location" for common view files by overriding the ActionView::ViewPaths.local_prefixes private class method that gets mixed in to every controller in Rails:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
def self.local_prefixes
['shared', controller_path]
end
private_class_method :local_prefixes
end
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def self.local_prefixes
[controller_path]
end
private_class_method :local_prefixes
end
Now, your error will say something like:
Missing partial users/_foo, shared/_foo, application/_foo
which shows that Rails will check the shared directory for partials as well before it goes looking in the application directory.
Note that this method override should happen in both the controllers, otherwise the local_prefixes in UsersController get inherited from ApplicationController and you end up with duplicated lookup paths that look like:
shared/_foo, users/_foo, shared/_foo, application/_foo
If all this is too much effort/too weird, as other people have pointed out, you can always just specify your shared partial directory manually when you render a partial:
<%= render 'shared/foo' %>
You can create new directory in app/views directory and add your shared file in that directory.
Ex:
app/views/shared # Contains all shared/partial pages
Now create your partial page in app/views/shared directory
like: app/views/shared/_my_shared_view.html.erb
Now if you want use this shared view in any view just add the below code.
<%= render :partial => 'shared/my_shared_view' %>
That's it. Hope this will help you.
I have code like render #posts to render my posts collection in an index template which the PostsController renders.
Now I have an Admin::PostsController that also should render the collection but when my posts controller renders #posts it looks for the admin/posts/_post.html.erb partial. Do I now have to write the partial path explicity? Is this feature by design or a bug? It doesn't seem to make sense.
Yes, you need to supply the path explicitly. And yes, this is by design.
It actually makes sense because Rails is a MVC framework and if you create a controller under a different namespace one would expect separate views for that controller too. Think about convenience, if you wanted to quickly bootstrap an application with a few simple commands, an application where there's a public view of posts and an admin view where all of the admin goodies for editing are, you would EXPECT to have a different directory to store all that admin views.
render #posts is a shortcut for a longer method signature.
In case of PostsController, it is a short cut for render :partial => "post", :collection => #posts; the partial is _post.html.erb and it is expected to be in app/views/posts folder.
In case of Admin::PostsController, it is a short cut for render :partial => "admin#post/post", :collection => #posts; the partial is _post.html.erb, and it is expected to be in app/views/admin/posts folder.
If you want a different partial to be used, you should specify it explicitly.
See the Rendering Collections section of Rails Guides page on Layouts & Rendering for detailed explanation.
I am building my first app with ROR and stumbled upon a couple of problems due to my understanding of the MVC
I have a page to add a new item, and this works fine, rails magically hooks it up to the items controller and somehow by magic it knows to look in the method 'new' as the page is called new.
But this layer is confusing me, as i need to now create a different version of new, same functionality but with a different look so to use a different layout to application.html.erb
So i attempt to create a copy of new.html.erb and create bookmarklet.html.erb - both contain exactly the same code: a link to a form. but of course bookmarklet will error on me because it does not have that link in the controller - how do i 'wire' up bookmarklet so that i can call the new method and so that it can behave in a similar way to the identical new.html.erb
Also, how can i tell the new bookmarklet.html.erb to ignore the application.html.erb and get its layout from another file?
thanks in advance
The magic happens in the routes. Rails uses something called RESTful routes, which is taking HTTP verbs and assigning standard actions to it. the new action is a GET request in HTTP speak, and if you are using scaffolding or following REST, will have the ruby call to build a new object in the controller, as an instance variable so you can use it in your view.
You have to tell rails routes that you want to BREAK this arrangement and to let /items/bookmarklet be used in the controller.
In your routes.rb file replace resources :items with
resources items do
member do
get 'bookmarklet'
end
end
In your controller put:
def bookmarklet
#item = Item.new
render :template => "bookmarklet", :layout => "different_layout" # or you can put this on the top of the controller, which is my style, but whatevs.
end
You should look into partials, if you are doing this as they clean up your code immensely.
A better way to think of things is to start with the controller instead of the view html.erb files. So each public method in your controller is effectively a page or action in the site. When you need a new action or page, add the method to the controller first. Then create the relevant view files.
So in your controller you'll need something like:
def bookmarklet
#item = Item.new(params[:item])
#item.save
render :template => "items/bookmarklet.html.erb", :layout => "different_layout.html.erb"
end
Normally you don't need to call render manually in the controller, but since you want a different layout than the default you need to specify it using render.
I have QuestionController
I now have AnotherQuestionController with actions which should render using templates and partials in app/views/question/
Is this possible? Seems like it should be.
I've tried
render :template => "question/answer"
but answer.html.erb includes partials and I get errors like
"Missing template another_question/_my_partial.erb in view path"
So is there a way to tell Rails "treat AnotherQuestionController as if its QuestionController and look for views and partials in app/views/question"?
Or will I have to create app/views/another_question - which will cause duplication (this can't be the Rails way).
Thanks
Template rendering should actually work
render :template => "question/answer"
The problem you were having is from the partials looking in the wrong place. The fix is simple, just make your partials absolute in any shared templates. For example, question/answer.html.erb should have
<%= render :partial => 'question/some_partial' %>
rather than the usual
<%= render :partial => 'some_partial' %>
You can achieve it with:
render 'question/answer'
Rails uses a list of prefixes to resolve templates and partials. While you can explicitly specify a prefix ("question/answer"), as suggested in another answer, this approach will fail if the template itself includes unqualified references to other partials.
Assuming that you have an ApplicationController superclass, and QuestionController inherits from it, then the places Rails would look for templates are, in order, "app/views/question/" and "app/views/application/". (Actually it will also look in a series of view paths, too, but I'm glossing over that for simplicity's sake.)
Given the following:
class QuestionController < ApplicationController
end
class AnotherQuestionController < ApplicationController
end
QuestionController._prefixes
# => ["question", "application"]
AnotherQuestionController._prefixes
# => ["another_question", "application"]
Solution #1. Place the partial under "app/views/application/" instead of "app/views/question/", where it will be available to both controllers.
Solution #2. Inherit from QuestionController, if appropriate.
class AnotherQuestionController < QuestionController
end
=> nil
AnotherQuestionController._prefixes
# => ["another_question", "question", "application"]
Solution #3. Define the class method AnotherQuestionController::local_prefixes
This was added in Rails 4.2.
class AnotherQuestionController < ApplicationController
def self.local_prefixes
super + ['question']
end
end
AnotherQuestionController._prefixes
# => ["another_question", "question", "application"]
You could try the inherit_views plugin (http://github.com/ianwhite/inherit_views/tree/master) I mentioned here in the answer to this question.
I'm pretty new to Rails and have an issue which I can't quite get my
head around as to the architecturally 'correct' way of doing it.
Problem relates to what I kinda call sub-controllers. The scenario is
this:
I have a series of pages, on which is a panel of some form containing
some information (think the user panel on gitHub top right).
So, in my app, I have controllers that generate the data for the pages
and render out the responses which is fine, but when it comes to this
panel, it seems to me that you would want some sort of controller action
dedicated to generating this panel and it's view.
Question is, how do you go about doing this? How do I render a 'sub
controller' from within a view?
I would put the logic in a helper or a module. (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Helpers/ClassMethods.html)
Then render partials where you want these things displayed. (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Partials.html)
Like Herman said, if it's logic that you need generated after the controller hands off to the view (ie, the Pages controller generates a page view, but you want a customized panel) then put it in a helper. Or, call a separate method in your Pages controller before handing off to the view. Or, if it's a lot of logic, create a Module and stick it in your /lib folder. So you could have a whole Panel module with methods that generate different parts of your Panel and which are called by your controller. But if you want to call these methods from within the view, then you should use a helper instead.
I dont think a module is what is required here, modules are required for shared behaviour across a small subset of your classes.
What I think is required here is the understanding of the inheritance of ApplicationController and also layouts
so, for example, my layout might look like:
<html>
<head><title>Foo</title></head>
<body>
<%= render :partial => (current_user ? "/shared/user_widget_bar" : "/shared/login_bar") %>
<%= yield %>
</body>
</html>
Any code that i want to use for it would go in my ApplicationController since it would be shared across the majority of my app:
before_filter :generate_user_widget
def generate_user_widget
if current_user
#avatar = ...
#unread_messages = ...
end
end
I understand that it might be cleaner for it to belong in a separate controller BUT honestly, unless the code is huge, it doesn't matter and can even still be put inside a module which is then included by ActionController. However it does need to be inside ApplicationController if you consider the scope of it.
If there are more related pages, say for example, you have a Rails app that manages multiple sites and you want shared behaviour across a particular site, try creating a parent controller which has no actions and only private methods, any controllers that need to have access to those methods can inherit off it. That way you can apply before filters to all controllers which inherit off it, saving you the pain of forgetting to add one in your non-parent controllers.
e.g:
class SiteA::SiteAParentController < ApplicationController
before_filter :generate_user_widget
...
end
class SiteA::ProductController < SiteA::SiteAParentController
def index
...
end
end
well, if you really need to call a controller action from the view, you can use components. They were part of the framework, now they only exist as plugins. One such plugin that seems to be well maintained is here: http://github.com/cainlevy/components/tree/master
from its docs:
== Usage
Note that these examples are very simplistic and would be better implemented using Rails partials.
=== Generator
Running script/generator users details will create a UsersComponent with a "details" view. You might then flesh out
the templates like this:
class UsersComponent < Components::Base
def details(user_or_id)
#user = user_or_id.is_a?(User) ? user_or_id : User.find(user_or_id)
render
end
end
=== From ActionController
class UsersController < ApplicationController
def show
return :text => component("users/detail", params[:id])
end
end
=== From ActionView
<%= component "users/detail", #user %>