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Using Rails 2.3.5, Ruby 1.8.7.

Is there any plugin that will make it easier to make my "show" and "edit" and "new" pages have the same look and feel? I'd love to be able to do the following type of thing. Right now, if I add a field to my model, I have to add it to both the edit.html.erb and the view.html.erb. I want to be able to specify the look fairly extensively, but I want "edit" and "show" to look the same (With execeptions between the two, perhaps, but not many.)

Is there any DRY tool for this?

Essentially, I'd like to be able to make my "edit.html.erb" to be:

<% plugin_form_helper_for @model do |form_helper| %>
  <%= render :partial => 'common_look', :locals => {:helper => form_helper} %>
<% end %>

and the show.html.erb be:

<% plugin_show_helper_for @model do |show_helper| %>
  <%= render :partial => 'common_look', :locals => {:helper => show_helper} %>
<% end %>

Then the "form_helper" and "show_helper" would implement the same interfaces (with some ability to branch to make slight differences between the layout/look of the two.)

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3 Answers 3

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+25

There is a plugin!

https://github.com/codez/dry_crud

It's very flexible.. just make sure you use the right version for rails 2.3

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1 Comment

It's not clear to me how this helps me, but I'll dig down deeper. The top level examples are about generalizing across several controllers, which is not what I want. I want the "show" view and the "edit/new" form views to look the same for a particular controller, with a fairly complicated layout. For historical reasons, I'm dealing with hundreds of fields at once, separated into groups via tabs.
2

I do something like what you're describing with custom input/display helper functions. For a simplified example, you could have a function you would call like this:

<%= my_field_helper(:model, :field_name) %>

And in your controller, you set a @context variable to either :show or :edit. The helper code contains a switch on @context, and if it's :edit, it outputs something like

<li>
    <label>Translation of Field</label>
    <input name="model[field_name]" value="???" />
</li>

(possibly use a generic @model variable in all your controllers, so the same function can be used on all your pages - or pass @my_model to the function itself) but when @context is :show (or maybe by default), it outputs something like this:

<li>
    <span class="label">Translation of Field</label>
    <span class="value">Field Value</span>
</li>

So now you can use the same exact code to show all your fields! You'll probably want to pull that code out into a partial, so you can easily have it wrapped in a form for edit, but not for show, but the critical bit is accomplished - if you need to add/move/delete fields, there's only one place you have to do it in.

Hope this helps!

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4 Comments

That's do-able, but it adds a number of methods in the ApplicationHelper, all of which branch on the value of @context. When behavior branches so often on a single variable, it seems to me that you'd want to separate them into two different classes with the same interface. Certainly, that is how I'll implement it myself if I end up implementing it myself...
@Thomas - That's not a bad idea. Something like @renderer = ShowRenderer.new(@my_model) in the controller, and then <%= @renderer.field(:field_name) %> in the view... I like it!
I wouldn't include that in the Controller. Rather, I'd have "show" create the "ShowRenderer." That was what I was getting to in my original code snippet - the plugin_show_helper_for @model { |helper| ... } would create the ShowRenderer and pass it to the block. (I called it 'helper,' but we'll call it renderer.) In general, the controller shouldn't have code that knows anything about the renderer. (Do you want to create the same @renderer for XML output, for example?)
@Thomas - Makes sense. A lot of sense, really. I may just tweak my design, then... Cheers!
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include that snippet in a _form.html.erb then call it in a common partial like show.html.erb

Then in your controller, point show and edit to the same partial(show.html.erb) or something like that.

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2 Comments

I don't want "show" to show input fields, I want "show" to render the fields as text. I just want the list of fields, their order, their containing divs, etc, to be the same.
I agree Thomas. Have you yet found a good solution for this? I want the same exact thing you are asking for!!

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