Question

For people that only want the question, here it is :

Is there a way to specify the folder to look in when you call render on an object? I don’t want to specify the view, only the folder to look in.

And for people that want context :

I am working on an activity stream system (something that looks like google+/facebook).

I have “Activities”, which are exactly like google+ feeds (or facebook, or whatever!). So, I have a simple loop that display each activities, which are bound to one of the following object (polymorphic) : User, Group, Comment, Note.

In my view that render an activity (views/activities/_activity.html.erb), I have

<%= render activity.object %>

where activity.object is a reference to the bound object (User, Group, Note, Comment). If it’s a user, it goes to views/users/_user.html.erb and renders it. For a group, views/groups/_group.html.erb.

That works just fine. However, I come to the point where the rendering of a group in my activities should not be the same rendering as in the group list page. Is there a way to specify the folder to look in when you call render on an object? So that my :

<%= render activity.object %>

would become :

<%= render activity.object, :folder => 'views/activities/' %>

Note that I don’t want to specify which view directly, as I don’t want to do a case for each of the possible types of objects (User, Group, Note, Comment) in the activity. I want to to have the same behaviour as of right now, which means if it finds a views/activities/_user.html.erb, it would load any user in the activities with that view instead of the one in the views/users/_user.html.erb.

Thanks

Answer 1

I’m not aware of any folder type option, but when I do this I usually do:

<%= render "activities/#{activity.object.class.name.underscore}" %>

That would give you similar behaviour.

EDIT A good point below by Dominic, if your classes are nested in namespaces, you will have to include the appropriate structure.

i.e.

 module Foo
   class Bar < ActiveRecord::Base
   end
 end

 # class.name is Foo::Bar, underscored is 'foo/bar'

 <%= render "activities/#{activity.object_type.underscore}" %>
 # will be in
 activities/foo/_bar.html