opensoul.org

Edge Rails picked up a new feature today we’ve often longed for at Collective Idea. Partials can have a layout:

<%= render :partial => "user", :layout => "admin", :collection => @users %>

This would wrap the user partial with the admin layout, which in this example adds an edit link for the admin user:

<% content_tag_for :li, user do %>
    <%= yield %> 
    <%= link_to 'Edit', edit_user_path(user) %>
<% end %>

Another cool feature in this patch is the ability to add a layout to any block in a template, for those one-off situations, or to just tidy up repeated markup:

<% render :layout => "admin", :locals => { :user => owner } do %> 
    <%= render :partial => "user", :collection => @users %>
      (owner)
<% end %>

Applications with an admin section often have a URL like http://myapp.com/admin, with that URL being a summary page, and all the other admin pages be under that URL (like, http://myapp.com/admin/users to edit users.). Without defining a lot of routes, this hasn’t been very easy with Rails…until now. Singleton resources have been merged into the 1.2 branch from edge-rails, so I thought I would share a little pattern that I’ve been using in several of my apps to accomplish this.

Singleton resources are like regular resources in Rails 1.2, except that they don’t have an :id parameter. This happens to work perfectly for using one controller to show a summary page, and then nesting the routes for other controllers inside of it.

The routes definition looks like this:

map.resource :admin do |admin|
  admin.resources :users
end

Update: The key here is map.resource (singular).

To make this work, generate an admin controller:

script/generate controller admin

You can now set up the “show” action in the admin controller to display a summary page.

The named route users_path now generates the URL /admin/users.