I feel the area where I need to improve most is in cleaning up my views. I feel like I’ve done a good job cleaning up my controllers and models, thanks to posts like Skinny Controller, Fat Model.
I have known about the content_for in rails views. Which basically allows you to have a layout like so:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="header">
<% yield :header %>
</div>
<div id="content">
<%= yield %>
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
<% yield :sidebar %>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<% yield :footer %>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And in your view the following:
<% content_for :header do %>
This would appear for the yield :header call
<% end %>
<% content_for :sidebar do %>
This is the sidebar content
<% end %>
<% content_for :footer do %>
This is the footer content
<% end %>
<%# the rest would just be the content for the plain yield call %>
This is would be my main content
This is nice, but I wanted to find a way to supply default content and this is what I came up with.
def yield_with_default(yield_on, content=nil, &block)
yield_content = eval "@content_for_#{yield_on} || ''"
if block_given?(&block)
concat(yield_content.empty? ? capture(&block) : yield_content, block.binding)
else
Binding.of_caller do |binding|
concat(yield_content.empty? ? content : yield_content, binding)
end
end
end
I placed this in my application_helper.rb file. And now I can add something like this to my view.
# with a block
<% yield_with_default :header do %>
This is my DEFAULT header content
<% end %>
# without a block
<% yield_with_default :header, "This would be my default content" %>
This feels pretty clean to me. But if anybody has any other suggestions I would love to hear them.
I am also looking for more information on best practices with views in Rails. There doesn’t seem to be much information on the subject.
UPDATED: 04/01/2007 – forgot the do in the content_for statements
