Question

What’s the best practice for storing and referencing JS for admin section of site?

Currently, I have an application.js that references a lot of JS (both vendor and app). I’d like to move some of the references into another file so it’s not loaded (unnecessarily) when a user is not admin.

I’m looking for the following behavior:

1. If user is not admin, load everything in application.js including all files under /assets/javascripts via //= require_tree .
2. If user is admin, load everything that a regular user would load. In addition, load some specific JS. I’m not sure where to store the JS since I don’t want it to be picked up by require_tree

Any suggestions on where to store the code, and how to call it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Maybe you can do something like this. Create a admin_application.js file that requires all your .js code you need for the admin users, excluding the require_tree directive, and maintain an unchanged application.js that has all the requires and stuff for non-admin users.
If they share a common layout, it would be easy enough to put some logic inside your header tag to handle the two cases. Example:

application.html.erb

<header>
  <% if current_user.is_admin? %>
    <%= javascript_include_tag "admin_application" %>
  <% else %>
    <%= javascript_include_tag "application" %>
  <% end %>
</header>

I think this is a easy and fair approach to your problem.