Question

I am just starting to pick up Ruby on Rails. I rather like it, but I ran into a roadblock. I know of two ways to solve a problem but I am curious as to what the “Rails Way” to do this is.

The Setup

I have an index page that lists project descriptions. When a user clicks on a project it brings them to the show function of the projects controller. Projects in the list are loaded from a MySQL database.

What I Want To Do

I want to be able to load project specific information on each “Project Page.” This information consists of documentation, code examples, etc. Each page will have the same general template.

Way 1

Store the HTML and text in the MySQL database in a “Sections” table and load all the sections related to that project. Display each section going down the page.

Way 2 (The way I would rather do it)

Have a separate view for each project with the full documentation. Load a specific view based on the project that is loaded in the show function

Comments

Is there some third way in Rails that I am not used to thinking of since I come from using CodeIgniter?

I am completely up for adapting to what the “Rails Way” is, but I am just not sure what the proper convention for this kind of thing is.

Or is this problem a case of, it does not matter how you do it at all?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this, one of the easiest ways is to override default template.(render :action doesn’t run any code in the target action only template)
This is Way2 in your question. Example:

def show
  @project = Project.find(params[:id])
  if @project.has_template?
    render :action => "show_#{@project.template_name}" and return
  end
  render :action => "show"
end 

In this example directory app/views/projects should have templates for each project
with names like “show.html.erb” for default one and “show_myspecialproject.html.erb” for project with template_name “myspecialproject” , etc….

Template_name is a method that tell you if project has such or should use default, you can put any logic in this method, it can be additional column id table or just template_name can be equal to project name, or it can just check if file exist in current directory.

You can also use partial templates if you want to use show.html.erb because you have code duplications and keep your templates DRY.
http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Partials.html
This way

controller action is default

def show
    @project = Project.find(params[:id])      
end 



in show.html.erb
<h1><%= @project.name %></h1>
<%= render @project.tamplate_name %>

In this example all partial templates should start with “_” ,
Ex. : “_myspecialproject.html.erb”