I just had a general doubt which I wanted to clear wrt Rails. I am currently working on Rails 2.0.2 for project specific purposes and I had a doubt especially related to this version of Rails.
I did a basic scaffold in my rails app on "posts".. something like ruby script/generate scaffold posts . This created a posts.html.erb file for me in my app/views/layouts .. I have seen in many blogs/screen casts they say when we add Javascript(JS) files like for e.g. those implementing jquery etc. we need to make include the necessary files in our "application.html.erb"files.. Now since I don't have anything exactly coined as such in my app.. does Rails by default take my posts.html.erb in my layouts as the equivalent application.html.erb..?
Or is that I need to explicitly create application.html.erb in my rails app?
My main concern behind this question is that would JS files be included in case if I have something like posts.html.erb or is that.. it should be done only in the application.html.erb..
Thank you..
For a PostsController, Rails will first look for an app/views/layouts/posts.html.erb file. Only if it doesn't find this controller-specific layout will it then fall back to app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.
does Rails by default take my posts.html.erb in my layouts as the equivalent application.html.erb..?
Yes. For the PostsController it will (by convention) take layouts/posts.html.erb as the overall layout template.
If you remove this file it will fall back to the layouts/application.html.erb layout.
My main concern behind this question is that would JS files be included in case if I have something like posts.html.erb or is that.. it should be done only in the application.html.erb..
You would have to include all necessary JS/CSS in each layout, as there is no layout inheritance.
If you want multiple layouts you can refactor out sections into partials (eg: for the <head> bit).
an app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file should have been generated for you when you did "rails new ProjectName"
make sure you have one... it controls the general layout of your web-site.
Related
I work on apps that often have thousands of partials and finding what partial is rendering a section of HTML can be tedious and just waste time.
In development mode, it would sometimes be very helpful to turn on a config to have every partial used be prefaced with its path in an HTML comment so I could quickly know how to access and edit it.
Is there a config option for this or a gem that someone has made for this?
This functionality is built-in to recent rails versions for erb templates.
See here for details: https://blog.saeloun.com/2020/05/11/rails-support-annotates-html-output-with-template-file-names.html
That page mentions another option you could try.
Here is a link to the rails pr that introduced the change: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/38848
I am trying to change the structure and design of the components of the ActiveAdmin layout, such as the navbar menu, icons and customize it to my style. Is this possible?
I need to overwrite the source code to be able to change the HTML structure, but I have tried to do it by placing files in the / lib folder and I have not succeeded. How could I overwrite the ActiveAdmin source code within my Rails project?
It is possible but many developers have discovered it is not easy. If you look through the various plugins you will find examples like Custom Layout, Sidebar, Menu and SubNav that may inspire you. However, if you are new to ActiveAdmin and your first priority is to customize the layout heavily then consider Administrate or vanilla Rails instead: they are still difficult, but you will be fighting the framework less.
I'm just learning the new asset pipeline in Rails 3.1. One particular problem I'm having is with the way Sprockets just mashes all the found CSS stylesheets into one massive stylesheet. I understand why this is advantageous over manually merging stylesheets and minifying for production. But I want to be able to selectively cascade stylesheets instead of having all rules all mashed together. For instance, I want:
master.css
to be loaded by all pages in the Rails app, but I want
admin.css only to be loaded by pages/views within the admin section/namespace.
How can I take advantage of the great way that Rails 3.1 combines stylesheets and minifies them for production, but also have the former flexibility of being able to load only certain stylesheet combinations per layout?
Or should this be done by adding a class to body tags in layouts-
body class="admin"
And then target style rules as appropriate. Using SASS scoped selectors this might be a reasonable solution.
This is how i solved the styling issue: (excuse the Haml)
%div{:id => "#{params[:controller].parameterize} #{params[:view]}"}
= yield
This way i start all the page specific .css.sass files with:
#post
/* Controller specific code here */
&#index
/* View specific code here */
&#new
&#edit
&#show
This way you can easily avoid any clashes.
Hope this helped some.
I have a post about this on my website:
Leveraging Rails 3.1, SCSS, and the assets pipeline to differentiate your stylesheets
And check out this answer to another question: Using Rails 3.1 assets pipeline to conditionally use certain css
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Lasse
#nathanvda: sure...
We make use of multiple layout files. So in our app/views/layouts, instead of having just application.html.haml (we use HAML), we actually ignore the application layout and use 3 custom layouts:
admin.html.haml (admin section views only)
registered.html.haml (registered/signed in users views only)
unregistered.html.haml (unregistered/unsigned in users views only)
So at the top of my admin.html.haml file I will have my stylesheet link tags to a separate admin.scss (we use SCSS) manifest. That manifest will load any necessary sub-stylesheets just for the admin section. This allows us to specify rules just for the admin section while also making use of common styles. For instance, we use jquery-ui throughout the site, so the styles associated with jquery-ui sit in their own stylesheet and we include them in the manifests for all 3 css manifest files.
This solution doesn't give you a single CSS file that can be cached, but it ends up giving you 3 CSS files, each of which can be cached. This allows a tradeoff between performance and some flexibility in organizing CSS rules so we don't have to worry about CSS rule collisions.
The way I've been doing it so far is to have two seperate folders a/ and u/ where a/ is for the admin view and u/ is for the user view. Then in the layout I point to the appropriate application.css with assets/u/application.css(js). Bit of a pain having to move the auto generated files each time but a lot less than having to require each file individually in the manifest.
I use something like
application.html.erb
">
show.html.erb
content_for :body_id do
page_specific_body_id
end
I am creating a custom CSS stylesheet for a Rails 3 application.
Is there a list anywhere of the CSS styles that Rails relies upon? So far I have found:
#notice
#error_explanation
.field_with_errors
Many thanks.
The css for the flash-messages you can choose yourself, as they are normally defined in application.html.erb (there is no default definition for flash-messages in rails 3).
For form-styling i would recommend using a gem like formtastic, which not only greatly simplifies making forms, but also provides a standard css file. So all needed tags are then known (and can be overwritten if needed).
If on the other hand you are looking at ways to get your complete layout started quickly, you might want to checkout web-app-theme or activo (which is even more complete).
A fresh Rails 3 app will not require any specific CSS class/id styles beyond the three you just mentioned, which is why no default stylesheet is generated until you start scaffolding.
If you run script/rails generate scaffold MyModel it will create a stylesheet called scaffold.css which the generated views will rely upon.
I'm a happy user of RoR but have one complaint. When I do script/generate scaffold it automatically generates all my files and places them in their proper folders. However, all the different scaffolds I've created name their view files the same.
I have a bunch of index.html.erb view files and when I have them open in my text editor, it's almost impossible to tell what controller they're related to.
I'd like to change the default naming scheme of the scaffold command to name the individual files to contain their view folder name. So, instead of index.html.erb, use index.home.html.
Is there a way to do this, or am I stuck? What solutions to the multiple files with the same name problem have you Rails developers discovered?
Thanks!
You're going to be fighting the Rails' conventions by going down that path and Rails works best when you work with it rather than against it. A core part of the philosophy of Rails is that there are a set of conventions that once learned make it easy to find your way around any Rails application.
Instead of trying to redefine how Rails works, I would recommend taking advantage of the features offered by your text editor or IDE for quickly navigating to the correct view template. For example, the Rails bundle within TextMate on the Mac lets you quickly open the view file associated with a particular model and there's a plugin for Vim that provides an equivalent feature.