Question

In my application.html.erb layout for my app, I want to have a partial that renders if it exists for the given view. for example.

If the visitor is at http://example.com/users/show, I’d want the partial /users/_sidebar.html.erb to render.

But if the visitor were at say, http://example.com/user/locations/san_francisco, I’d want the partial /users/locations/_sidebar.html.erb to render.

So the thing here is that if there were no partial for that controller/action it would render some generic partial in my shared directory, and I’d rather not litter every single view with content_for blocks ya know?

Any ideas guys?

Answer 1

Sean Behan has a great post on exactly this:

http://seanbehan.com/programming/render-partial-if-file-exists/

I might move it to a helper and tweak it a bit to:

<%= render_sidebar %>

# This method could use either the rescue or the if file exists technique.
def render_sidebar
  render(:partial => "/#{controller.name}/sidebar"
rescue
  #default side bar
end