The Rails Way for Reducing HTML Duplication

Question

In my .html.erb file, I have a lot of lines of information to display. I am accomplishing this with a simple: (using blueprint css)

<% for event in @user.events %>
<div class="span-5 border">Descriptor:</div> <div class="span-5 last"><%=h event.foo%></div><br/>
<% end %>

How can I make it so that I can call some function that would render the information part and I would pass it just the Descriptor (a string literal) and the method for event ("foo" in this case).

I'm new to rails and I think this could be accomplished using a partial render, but I'm not entirely sure.

Thanks

Answer 1

render :partial => 'event', :collection => @user.events, :locals => {:descriptor => 'descriptor', :method => 'foo'}

If you're using a recent version of rails this shorthand version will also work:

render @user.events, :locals => {:descriptor => 'descriptor', :method => 'foo'}

In your partial

<div class="span-5 border"><%= descriptor -%></div> <div class="span-5 last"><%=h event.send(method) %></div><br/>

Answer 2

You can use partials. Its advantage that it makes code DRY.Also you can replace the particular div by Ajax callback. Save the partials with prefix '_' on file name like _test.rhtml

render :partial => 'test', :layout => false