ianwhite / inherit_views >>info >>api

Status

inherit_views works with rails 2.x

If you’re on rails 2.3 or rails edge, you want inherit_views/master

If you’re on rails 2.2, you want inherit_views/rails-2.2

If you’re on rails 2.0, or 2.1, you want inherit_views/rails-2.0-2.1

what does it do?

This rails plugin allows your controllers/mailers to inherit their views from parent controllers/mailers. The default behaviour is to inherit along the ancestor path of the controller/mailer, but you can also specify custom inherit view paths to search.

Example:

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    inherit_views
  end

  class FooController < ApplicationController
    # will look for views in 'views/foo', then 'views/application'
  end

  class BarController < FooController
    # will look for views in 'views/bar', then 'views/foo', then 'view/application'
  end

See InheritViews for more details

NOTE: this plugin is not aimed at having multiple view paths for your controllers, which is addressed with the view_paths addition to ActionController::Base for rails 2.0. Rather, within these view paths, you can inherit views from other controller paths.

In templates

You can render the ‘parent’ template from within a template if you so choose. This works for partials and top-level templates alike.

foo/view.html.erb

  <h1>Foo View</h1>

bar/view.html.erb

  <%= render :parent %>
  <h2>With some 'bar' action</h2>

rendering bar/view (with the controller setup described above):

  <h1>Foo View</h1>
  <h2>With some 'bar' action</h2>

Installation

You can install inherit_views as either a plugin or a gem. The easiest method is to install as a plugin by running the following command in your Rails project’s top level directory:

  ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/ianwhite/inherit_views.git

This method will install the plugin into [RAILS PROJECT HOME]/vendor/plugins.

If you find yourself installing inherit_views into many plugins a better alternative is to install the plugin as a gem so that it can be used in any Rails application (this requires RubyGems).

  sudo gem install ianwhite-inherit_views

Then, in your project’s environment.rb, add a line like the following after the Rails::Initializer.run do |config| line.

  config.gem 'ianwhite-inherit_views', :lib => 'inherit_views'

Then restart your sever!

Note that the gem version is compatible with >= Rails 2.3.

Testing & CI

RSpec is used for testing, so the tests are in spec/ rather than test/ Do rake —tasks for more details.

garlic is used for CI, see garlic.rb for details on what versions of rails are tested.

Contributors

Author: Ian W. White

Contributions by:

• The Dark One
• Topher Fangio