Question

Ok so I have a small project with two different scaffoldings I’ve made.In the layouts directory therefor there is two different layout.html.erb files.

My question is how to condense this into just one main layout file that the two scaffolded views share.

Basically my purpose for doing this is so that I only have to have my navigation bar and header and other such things all in one place.

Answer 1

if you name the layout file application.html.erb, then it will be the default layout file. If you specify a layout file by the same name of your controller, that will override the default layout.

From Rails Guides:

To find the current layout, Rails
first looks for a file in
app/views/layouts with the same base
name as the controller. For example,
rendering actions from the
PhotosController class will use
app/views/layouts/photos.html.erb (or
app/views/layouts/photos.builder). If
there is no such controller-specific
layout, Rails will use
app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
or
app/views/layouts/application.builder.
If there is no .erb layout, Rails will
use a .builder layout if one exists.
Rails also provides several ways to
more precisely assign specific layouts
to individual controllers and actions.

source: http://guides.rails.info/layouts_and_rendering.html

EDIT:

I should add that you can specify any layout to be your default in the Application Controller:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  layout 'some_layout_name'
end

And that will override name matching that rails does automatically.

I hope this helps!