Rails core - Jul 2006 - If controllers inherit then why not views? / DRY, REST & other buzzwords.

Hi,

If I have controllers that inherit actions and helper methods then why
not views that "inherit" templates and partials? I''ve been
trying to
DRY up my code and make it more REST friendly after the fallout of
DHH''s "A World of Resources" slides and blog post.

With a move towards more RESTful controller design, we are going to
have more controllers with the basic 7 actions (index, show, edit,
update, new, create, destroy). Much of the functionality of these
actions can be moved into ApplicationController to keep our code DRY.
This is a move away from scaffold-type controllers and is shown on

http://www.artofmission.com/articles/2006/07/05/rest-ful-technique-make-your-controllers-even-smaller

It would be great if views could be shared in the same way instances
inherit from superclasses.

Following the art of mission example, when rendering the page create
or edit pages

== views/application/new.rhtml =
<h1>Create a new record</h1>
<%= render :partial=>''form'' %>


== views/application/edit.rhtml =
<h1>Edit a new record</h1>
<%= render :partial=>''form'' %>


== views/page/edit.rhtml (overrides views/application/edit.rhtml) =
<h1>Edit a new PAGE</h1>
<%= render :partial=>''form'' %>


== views/page/_form.rhtml =
<%= form_tag %>
...
<%= end_form_tag %>


So when page/new is being rendered views/application/new.rhtml and
views/page/_form.rhtml are used since Rails can''t find a template
called views/page/new.rhtml.

When page/edit is being rendered view/page/edit.rhtml and
views/page/_from.rhtml are used.

So Rails would always starts looking for templates in the view
directory corresponding to the controller and keep looking up view
directories in a search path that match the controllers inheritance
path. For each partial the process would be just the same.

I tried to keep this short. All I''m trying to say is make view
directories work like classes and make templates work like instance
methods. Sound like it would be nice and DRY to effectively share
views?

Thanks,
Peter