ruby on rails logic for a partial in a layout

Question

I have a sidebar that is going to have some logic in it, similar to how a view talks to a controller. Where do I put the logic in for the partial? Do I create a new controller for the layout and put it in there?

The layout is for logged in users, like a dashboard. The dashboard is going to have a sidebar that shows the same dynamic content on every page. Since it's being shown on every page I want to put it in a partial.

I'm just confused on where to put the find's and all that information.

Answer 1

Put the partial in the layouts folder. The name of the file should start with an underscore For example, "_mypartial.html.erb".

Then, in your views, use the following code to include the partial

<%= render :partial => "mypartial" %>

Note that you do not include the underscore in the embedded ruby code when specifying which partial to render.

Answer 2

Maybe there's a better way to do this, but if it's on most or all pages you could create a before_filter on your ApplicationController. You'll have to call skip_before_filter on the controllers/actions that don't need the data.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :load_sidebar_data

protected
  def load_sidebar_data

  end
end

If you don't need it on most pages you'd still put the method in the ApplicationController, you'd just add the before filter where you need it.

Answer 3

You might consider using Cells (view components for Rails): http://cells.rubyforge.org/