rails reusing view templates

Question

Hello guys, A rails newbie here

I have 2 actions in my controller 1) index 2) refine_existing. Both of them show the results in the same format. How do I reuse the index.html.erb file?

When I try the following, it complains about refine_existing.erb not being present.

def refine_existing
   ...
  respond_to do |format|
  format.html # index.html.erb
  format.xml  { render :xml => @results }
end

end

my index action looks like this

def index
 #some logic to get @results
 #set some session variables etc.
 respond_to do |format|
  format.html # index.html.erb
  format.xml  { render :xml => @results }
 end
end  

Do I have to refactor my index view to contain partials that
a) make the headers
b) render @results and reuse them? Even though, both index.html.erb and refine_existing.html.erb will look exactly the same

Is there any way I can say in my refine_existing action to use index.erb view?

thanks in advance

Answer 1

By convention, if you don't specify a template name Rails looks for one matching the action. You can override this by calling render explicitly with the desired template name. The only wrinkle is that the path is relative to TEMPLATE_ROOT, which is normally app/views:

def refine_existing
   ...
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html { render :template => "<table_name>/index.html.erb" }
  end
end

replacing table_name with the "tablized" form of the model. E.g. if your controller is PostsController, then posts. So your template would then live in app/views/posts/index.html.erb -- if you've customized paths somehow adjust as necessary.