Question

Just learning rails and looking for best practices help. I have the same data table that is reused across several different views (index, search results) for my controller. In an attempt to keep it DRY I have the table code in a helper method using html<< for table HTML.

I realize that now I’ve pulled a chunk of my HTML into the controller which I’m not a big fan of. How is this situation of having a chunk of HTML you plan to reuse across several views handled best?

Thanks!

Answer 1

What you want are partials. You put the partials in the same folder as the views, but partials start with an underscore (e.g: app/views/user/_my_partial.html.erb). In this partial you can put the shared HTML code, and access it from the view with:

<%= render "my_partial" %>

Yes you skip the underscore when you access the partial.

See the rails guide for more information on partials.