The Mechanical Turk

Edge rails recently added support for multiple view paths. Very cool. This means you can ship a plugin complete with views, and have your controllers use those views (without copying them to app/views), and you get overriding for free.

inherit_views (svn and rdoc) is a plugin that allows you to do something similar, but within a controller hierarchy. (This is not a replacement, or duplication of 'multiple view paths')

Example

Here's an example of the syntax

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  inherit_views
end

class UserPostsController < PostsController
end

UserPostsController will look for a particular view in app/views/user_posts, if it doesn't find it, then it looks in app/views/posts.

For the example above, you may wish to change some aspects of just index.rhtml, and leave the other views alone. Previously you would have to set up a bunch of erb (or haml, or whatever) files that either duplicate, or render the unchanged files. No longer.

render_parent

The inheritance model is familiar, so why not have the familiar 'super' construct in views?. You can now:

posts/_resource.rhtml:
  <%= post.title %>
  <%= link_to 'comments', comments_path(post) %>
  
user_posts/_resource.rhtml:
  <%= render_parent :locals => {:post => post} %>
  <%= link_to 'my comments', user_comments_path(@user, post) %>

Why?

Two main reasons:

1. Making life for STI users (I'm a heavy user) easier. This is a classic case where inheriting views makes life easier. It's also easier if you use something like resources_controller to decouple the model name form the view (instead of @my_model - which then becomes @my_model_subclass, use a local, or in the case of resources_controller resource)
2. Providing the basic tools to build auto-scaffold type systems. I think the idea of these systems is great - but they never work quite right for me. For me, they cover too much ground, make too many assumptions. So, I'd like to have a set of tools that help me easily build one of these auto-scaffold things for use in just one, or a few projects. inherit_views and resources_controller are two such tools.