Where would I go about placing partial files shared by more than one model?
I have a page called crop.html.erb that is used for one model - Photo.
Now I would like to use it for another model called User as well.
I could copy and paste the code but that's not very DRY, so I figured I would move it into a partial.
Since it's shared between two models - where would I place that partial?
Thanks!
The Rails convention is to put shared partials in /app/views/shared.
Update
Layout inheritance is now in the guides under layout and rendering
Template inheritance works similarly.
Rails 3.1 and following versions implement template inheritance, so I think the correct place for shared partials is now /app/views/application/, say you are in products#index you can do the following:
-# products#index
= render #products.presence || 'empty'
-# /app/views/application/_empty.html.haml
There are no items
btw it's application because the connection is the controller inheritance, so this assumes ProductsController < ApplicationController
This way if you implement /app/views/products/_empty.html.haml that will be taken, the above is a fallback for all the missing partials, and I can't check right now, but I think even for the template itself...
Railscast: template inheritance!
TL;DR
Rails 3.1, Rails 4, Rails 5 and whatever comes next
app/views/application
The engine searches this path automatically if the view is not found in the controller path.
Rails 3 and prior
app/views/shared
The engine does NOT search this path automatically.
Long story
Rails 3 (and prior version) have no default location for storing shared views.
The unofficial convention is to store shared views in app/views/shared. Wherever you'd end up storing them though, you have to specify the path
# render app/views/shared/menu.html.erb
<%= render :partial => "shared/menu" %>
This suggestion was popularized by Agile Web Development with Rails.
Rails 3.1 introduces an official standard for where to store shared views:
app/views/application
Thanks to this standard, the engine now automatically looks for templates in app/views/application. As a result, you don't have to use the full path anymore.
Those curious can follow here the thought process behind this decision.
Old syntax
# render app/views/application/menu.html.erb
# unless menu.html.erb is found in appp/views/my_controller
<%= render :partial => "menu" %>
New syntax
# render app/views/application/menu.html.erb
# unless menu.html.erb is found in appp/views/my_controller
<%= render partial: "menu" %>
Of course, you can still place your shared views wherever you want and reference them by path
<%= render :partial => "my_own_special_shared_folder/menu" %>
Unless you have a very good reason to do this though, please stick to the new standard and store your shared views in app/views/application.
The Rails View uses app/views/layouts for shared partials like header and footer, but the Ruby on Rails Guide uses app/views/shared in an example. I guess it comes down to personal preference. I would use layouts for high-level stuff like a main nav or a footer, but shared for more narrow controller-level stuff like a form.
I general have a shared folder in my views that contains commonly used partials.
I arrived here in 2021 (rails 6) and got confused by the answers (many different ways).
I asked some senior rails developers what they'd do and they also gave me 2 different answers.
But TL;DR
Create a folder called 'shared' or 'application' inside your views folder (e.g. app/views/shared or app/views/application.
Then simply move the partial there, and access it with either
<%= render partial: 'shared/socials' %>
# or
<%= render partial: 'application/socials' %>
or even simpler
<%= render 'shared/socials' %>
# or
<%= render 'application/socials' %>
It doesn't matter where you put them. You can render any partial at any arbitrary location by providing the file's path to render - it doesn't need to be associated with the controller that's rendering it. I use a directory simply called partials under the view directory, and call partials in it like this:
render :partial => 'partials/mypartial'
Related
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.
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.
What is the convention for using a partial to list an item, vs the partial show show / edit / new
For instance on an overview one would want to do:
[ app/parts/ ]
(parts/index.html.erb)
<h1> Parts and stuff! </h1>
<table>
# headers and such
<%= render :partial => #parts %>
</table>
# calls _part to make a list, usually the 3 most important things
Then we have something like
[ app/parts/new ]
(parts/new.html.erb)
# what is the convention for the partial here?
# Said partial would be used for new / edit
I know you can specify render :partial => "path/to/partial", but I was hoping for a resource based route to want a partial by some conventional name.
Rails doesn't really have conventions for partial names. Conventions are for RESTful template names for controller actions, i.e., index, new, show, edit. The actions create, update, and destroy use redirects rather than rendering anything directly.
Partials serve two purposes: one is when you want to avoid duplication, i.e., for new/edit forms. The other is when you want to update pages with AJAX. Naming conventions are basically up to you, just try to be consistent.
But routes (resource-based or otherwise) don't really apply to partials; they're handled by the template engine, not the dispatcher.
If you'd like to see generators that effectively use partials in action, try Ryan Bates' nifty_generators gem.
You can find it here: https://github.com/ryanb/nifty-generators
Usually _form_part or _part depending on context.
This question already has answers here:
Where to put partials shared by the whole application in Rails?
(7 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I am using Ruby on Rails 3.0.7 and I am planning to use partial templates. All classes in my application would use same partials so I have to decide where to located all those.
Is it a good idea to put "global" shared partial templates in the lib folder? If no, what is a common practice to choose the folder where to put those? Any advice on how to properly name and load that folder?
The standard is placing all shared partials in app/views/shared, and referencing them as
render :partial => 'shared/partial_name'
If you have a standard "row in a list" partial (say, for an index page), you could use a shared partial like:
# To render a single object row:
render :partial => 'shared/item', :locals => { :item => #item }
# Or to render them all:
render :partial => 'shared/item', :collection => #items
Rails 4:
put the partials you intend to use through out your application in /app/views/application
Then anywhere in your application you can easily:
render partial: 'partial_name', variable_name: variable
The added benefit is that you can always override the partial in a particular view space by redefining what that partial means in /app/views/controller_name/_partial_name.html.erb and the calls to the partial will then reference the more specific context you're in. If that doesn't exist you get the application level partial.
Suggestion taken from Thoughtbot
Conventions is to put them under app/views/shared
If you're going to have many partials, I'd recommend you putting them into subdirectories of that folder, whatever makes sense to your application, since having many partials in one directory is generally not a good practice.
I have a Ruby/Rails app that has two or three main "sections". When a user visits that section, I wish to display some sub-navigation. All three sections use the same layout, so I can't "hard code" the navigation into the layout.
I can think of a few different methods to do this. I guess in order to help people vote I'll put them as answers.
Any other ideas? Or what do you vote for?
You can easily do this using partials, assuming each section has it's own controller.
Let's say you have three sections called Posts, Users and Admin, each with it's own controller: PostsController, UsersController and AdminController.
In each corresponding views directory, you declare a _subnav.html.erb partial:
/app/views/users/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/posts/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/admin/_subnav.html.erb
In each of these subnav partials you declare the options specific to that section, so /users/_subnav.html.erb might contain:
<ul id="subnav">
<li><%= link_to 'All Users', users_path %></li>
<li><%= link_to 'New User', new_user_path %></li>
</ul>
Whilst /posts/_subnav.html.erb might contain:
<ul id="subnav">
<li><%= link_to 'All Posts', posts_path %></li>
<li><%= link_to 'New Post', new_post_path %></li>
</ul>
Finally, once you've done this, you just need to include the subnav partial in the layout:
<div id="header">...</div>
<%= render :partial => "subnav" %>
<div id="content"><%= yield %></div>
<div id="footer">...</div>
Partial render. This is very similar to the helper method except perhaps the layout would have some if statements, or pass that off to a helper...
As for the content of your submenus, you can go at it in a declarative manner in each controller.
class PostsController < ApplicationController
#...
protected
helper_method :menu_items
def menu_items
[
['Submenu 1', url_for(me)],
['Submenu 2', url_for(you)]
]
end
end
Now whenever you call menu_items from a view, you'll have the right list to iterate over for the specific controller.
This strikes me as a cleaner solution than putting this logic inside view templates.
Note that you may also want to declare a default (empty?) menu_items inside ApplicationController as well.
Warning: Advanced Tricks ahead!
Render them all. Hide the ones that you don't need using CSS/Javascript, which can be trivially initialized in any number of ways. (Javascript can read the URL used, query parameters, something in a cookie, etc etc.) This has the advantage of potentially playing much better with your cache (why cache three views and then have to expire them all simultaneously when you can cache one?), and can be used to present a better user experience.
For example, let's pretend you have a common tab bar interface with sub navigation. If you render the content of all three tabs (i.e. its written in the HTML) and hide two of them, switching between two tabs is trivial Javascript and doesn't even hit your server. Big win! No latency for the user. No server load for you.
Want another big win? You can use a variation on this technique to cheat on pages which might but 99% common across users but still contain user state. For example, you might have a front page of a site which is relatively common across all users but say "Hiya Bob" when they're logged in. Put the non-common part ("Hiya, Bob") in a cookie. Have that part of the page be read in via Javascript reading the cookie. Cache the entire page for all users regardless of login status in page caching. This is literally capable of slicing 70% of the accesses off from the entire Rails stack on some sites.
Who cares if Rails can scale or not when your site is really Nginx serving static assets with new HTML pages occasionally getting delivered by some Ruby running on every thousandth access or so ;)
You could use something like the navigation plugin at http://rpheath.com/posts/309-rails-plugin-navigation-helper
It doesn't do sub-section navigation out of the box, but with a little tweaking you could probably set it up to do something similar.
I suggest you use partials. There are a few ways you can go about it. When I create partials that are a bit picky in that they need specific variables, I also create a helper method for it.
module RenderHelper
#options: a nested array of menu names and their corresponding url
def render_submenu(menu_items=[[]])
render :partial => 'shared/submenu', :locals => {:menu_items => menu_items}
end
end
Now the partial has a local variable named menu_items over which you can iterate to create your submenu. Note that I suggest a nested array instead of a hash because a hash's order is unpredictable.
Note that the logic deciding what items should be displayed in the menu could also be inside render_submenu if that makes more sense to you.
I asked pretty much the same question myself: Need advice: Structure of Rails views for submenus? The best solution was probably to use partials.
There is another possible way to do this: Nested Layouts
i don't remember where i found this code so apologies to the original author.
create a file called nested_layouts.rb in your lib folder and include the following code:
module NestedLayouts
def render(options = nil, &block)
if options
if options[:layout].is_a?(Array)
layouts = options.delete(:layout)
options[:layout] = layouts.pop
inner_layout = layouts.shift
options[:text] = layouts.inject(render_to_string(options.merge({:layout=>inner_layout}))) do |output,layout|
render_to_string(options.merge({:text => output, :layout => layout}))
end
end
end
super
end
end
then, create your various layouts in the layouts folder, (for example 'admin.rhtml' and 'application.rhtml').
Now in your controllers add this just inside the class:
include NestedLayouts
And finally at the end of your actions do this:
def show
...
render :layout => ['admin','application']
end
the order of the layouts in the array is important. The admin layout will be rendered inside the application layout wherever the 'yeild' is.
this method can work really well depending on the design of the site and how the various elements are organized. for instance one of the included layouts could just contain a series of divs that contain the content that needs to be shown for a particular action, and the CSS on a higher layout could control where they are positioned.
There are few approaches to this problem.
You might want to use different layouts for each section.
You might want to use a partial included by all views in a given directory.
You might want to use content_for that is filled by either a view or a partial, and called in the global layout, if you have one.
Personally I believe that you should avoid more abstraction in this case.