Question

I’d like to know the best way to go about doing this. I was reading the Rails Guides on layouts but I am a little stumped with this.

I have a users controller and a sessions controller. The users controller is used to “sign up” and the sessions controller is used to “sign in”. Both of these controllers render the same layout for login and sign up (accounts.html.erb).

Once they are signed in I want to render a different layout for everything that happens when they are signed in (application.html.erb). My problem is that in the Users controller, I have a ‘show’ action, which is the users profile, which is only viewable when the user is logged in but this ‘show’ action is using the accounts.html.erb layout because of the ‘create’ and ‘new’ actions. I want the ‘show’ action to use application.html.erb and the rest of the actions in here to use accounts.html.erb. Should I be using template inheritance for this sort of thing or what’s the proper way to go about this type of thing?

Perhaps some code will help as well:

class UsersController < ApplicationController  
  layout 'accounts'

 def show
   @user = User.find(params[:id])
   @title = @user.name
 end

 def new
   @user = User.new
   @title = "Sign up"
 end

 def create
   @user = User.new(params[:user])
   if @user.save
     sign_in @user
     flash[:success] = "Welcome"
     redirect_to @user
   else
     @title = "Sign up"
     render :action => "new"
   end
 end

end

Answer 1

If the show action is the only one in this controller that needs to use “application.html.erb” just render it with that layout at the end of the action.

render :layout => "application"

If you are looking to do something a little more robust you could add a method to your application_controller.rb to determine the layout based on whether the user was signed in or not:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  ...
  def determine_layout
    if (signed_in) then
      return "application"
    else
      return "accounts"
    end
  end
  ...
end

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
    @title = @user.name

    render :layout => determine_layout
  end
end

The downside to this is you have to have determine_layout at the end of each action you want to allow both layouts for. You can’t add an after_filter to determine the layout because the action will already have been rendered by that point.