Question

I have a basic CMS and i’m hugely using cross-controller rendering within it.

class Index < E
  map '/'

  # some actions

  def ad
    @steroids = render_p('anabolic-steroids/ads/left-banner')
    # some logic
  end
end

Steroids class:

class Steroids < E
  map 'anabolic-steroids'

  # actions
end

View folder:

view/
  |
  - anabolic-steroids/
      |
      - ads/
          |
          - left-banner.erb
  # other templates

Everything works well, but now customer wants anabolic-steroids URL
to be renamed into steroids

To make this work i remapped Steroids class:

map :steroids

and renamed view/anabolic-steroids/ folder to view/steroids/.

And Steroids controller works well with new URL.

But now all other controllers that were rendering steroids ad are broken 🙁

And i have to find all places where it is used and rename

render_p('anabolic-steroids/ads/left-banner')

to

render_p('steroids/ads/left-banner')

Odd!

I have also other lot of places where i’m using cross-controller rendering like this.

Any way to avoid useless refactoring
when such innocent renaming requests comes from customers?

Answer 1

Quite long description for a slightly trivial issue 🙂 (joking, sorry, good question though)

The solution is simple, really simple – never use strings where you can use something else…

Seems you missed this on documentation – “To render a template of inner controller, pass controller as first argument and the template as second.”

See official docs here

So to survive any renaming issues use cross-controller rendering like this:

render_p(Steroids, 'ads/left-banner')

Now you should not worry about “innocent renaming requests” 🙂