Question

A newbie question:

I have a partial that I’m loading on a website on different pages.

That partial needs some data, so in the controller of the parent view I do the query:
@properties = Property.find(:all)

I pass the query results to the partial in the view using :locals

Now, I would like to render the same partial from another view. This view has a different controller. Do I have to repeat the query in that controller also? Or can I have a separate controller for partials I use one more places in the website. In this last case, how do I indicate which controller to use in the view when I put the render command?

Or should I use somethink different than partials for this kind of use?

Kind regards,
Michael

Answer 1

You don’t need to copy the code to set up the partial’s data, but you would need to hoist it into a controller that your two controllers inherit from. Normally, this would be your ApplicationController. Define a method in there that loads the data you need. For example:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  # ... your code ...

protected

  def load_partial_data
    @properties = Property.find(:all)
  end

end

Now to actually call this method you have two options:

1. If all your controllers need this data, add a before_filter to your ApplicationController like before_filter :load_partial_data
2. Otherwise, add the before_filter to just the controllers that actually need to load the data.

I hope this helps.