Updating inherit_views for edge rails
September 23rd, 2008
Rails edge is getting lots of changes under the hood, consequently garlic has been kicking up a fuss for response_for and inherit_views...
So, I've rewritten them! Both plugins are now a lot cleaner, and have less LOC, due to some great changes under the actionpack hood.
inherit_views | response_for
inherit_views is a pretty simple concept. When you subclass a controller in rails, it would be great if you controller inherited its views from the the view path of the superclass controller. Here's how to use it (or you can just Skip ahead to the rewrite).
Using inherit_views
If you want every controller to inherit it's views from parent controllers, then do this:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
inherit_views
I think this is generally a bad idea, I use inherit views when I need to (when I subclass a controller):
class AccountImagesController < ImagesController
inherit_views 'images'
When you use inherit_views, all view types are supported, as are partials. This means that with the following setup:
images/_form.html.erb
images/edit.html.erb
account_images/_form.html.erb
rendering 'edit' from AccountImages controller will render account_images/_form.html.erb inside images/edit.html.erb.
Rewriting inherit_views for edge
The inherit_views plugin used to acheive this by alias_method_chaining render on the controller and the view, and it would substitute an inherited view if the standard view couldn't be found. Along the way, it got patched for various changes in the rails internal, and well... it got pretty messy.
Edge rails has had a lot of template love recently, and one of the great things is that the notion of picking a template to render now has a single point of entry: ActionView::Base#_pick_template. (there is also _pick_partial_template, but that just massages the filename into the partial format, then calls _pick_template).
This made me stoked because all of the shennanigans in inherit_views could be swept away, and replaced with #_pick_template_from_inherit_view_paths. The only thing left for the plugin to do is to manage the inherit view paths (these are stored on the controller).
A note for current inherit_views users, I've removed some of the API which I never used (render_parent, and some other things). Let me know if you really need that stuff...
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.