Problem sharing common layout folder between multiple gems

[fgarcia]

I have multiple gemified Padrino apps sharing a common layout. One of them has the main layout and the others point theirs to the central one.

I noticed that the layout setting will not take a full path, but I solved temporally this problem by calculating the relative path as I do in this example (lines 24-34 - highlight does not seem to be working today)

Since the path is relative from ./app/views/layouts it seems that Padrino requires the folder to exist, even if it is empty. Removing the empty layout causes the relative indirection to fail.

Ideally I would like being able to set a full path. Is there any technical reason preventing this?

Since git will ignore empty folders, other people sharing a central layout between gems will have to do some debugging because there is no warning/error explaining that the layout folder must exist even if empty.

[ujifgc]

Sinatra has the ability to render external layouts using :layout_options => { :views => '/absolute/path/to/views/folder/containing/layouts/folder/with/layouts' } options on a route definition, however this setting can not be set globally for an app.

The routine is here: https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/28af01e6af721c102b9d6d8abb39f4708a97d808/lib/sinatra/base.rb#L828-L832

To solve this problem just in Padrino we could remove super to this Sinatra render method and call #compile_template, template#render directly. This will spare us two super calls for every request.

Or if we want to be compatible we could bring this problem to @sinatra and @rkh.

@padrino/core-members ?

[fgarcia]

Here goes an update for people having the same problem

I've just realized of this alternative hack:

render('/path/my/layout', :layout => nil) do
  render 'home/index',  :layout => nil
end

The downside is that I must be careful when adding my yield block to avoid the html tags being scaped.

I've just implemented this solution with a custom helper but I am not sure of any extra side effect. Although it is just a hack, at least this no longer requires the existence of an empty folder.