#99 Complex Partials

Mar 31, 2008 | 8 minutes | Views, Refactoring

How do you handle partials which have differences depending on the action which is rendering them? Here's three suggestions for this problem.

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I should have mentioned, not all of the tips work best for this specific example. I would probably stop after the first tip. But I wanted to give you some more ideas for solving this problem which may work well in your situation.

          index.html.erb
        
<% for article in @articles %>
  <% render :layout => 'article', :object => article do %>
    <p><%=h article.description %></p>
    <p><%= link_to "Read More...", article %></p>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

          show.html.erb
        
<% stylesheet 'article' %>
<% render :layout => 'article', :object => @article do %>
  <%= simple_format(h(@article.content)) %>
<% end %>

          _article.html.erb
        
<div class="article">
  <h2><%= link_to_unless_current h(article.name), article %></h2>
  <div class="info">
    by <%= article.author %> on <%= article.created_at.to_s(:long) %>
    <span class="comments">
      <%= link_to pluralize(article.comments.size, 'Comment'), article %>
    </span>
  </div>
  <div class="content">
    <%= yield %>
  </div>
</div>

          layouts/application.html.erb
        
<%= yield(:head) %>

          application_helper.rb
        
def stylesheet(*args)
  content_for(:head) { stylesheet_link_tag(*args) }
end

          article.css
        
.article .comments_link {
  display: none;
}