ianwhite / inherit_views >>info >>api

Status

inherit_views works with rails 2.x

If you’re on rails master (2.3), 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>

Development mode

Because of recent changes in the way 2.3 finds templates, using inherit_views may result in a noticeable slow-down in development mode. This slow down will not occur in production mode. (Thanks to thedarkone for pointing this out, and showing me the reason why).

If you are noticing a slowdown in development mode check out rails-dev-boost.

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