Rails - Jul 2005 - Composite Views

Hello:

How do you create a composite view? I have a form based on the model
"contacts" which consists the following models:
- organization
- person
- address

I was going to use partials to create the form; e.g:
- organizations/_form.rhtml
- people/_form.rhtml .etc

...and render them with the appropriate tag:

<%= render_partial ''people/form'',  @person %>

I wanted to pass a person  for use with the text field helper:

<%= text_field ''person'', ''first_name'' 
%>

In my contact controller I had to ammend the "new" method to this:

  def new
    @contact = Contact.new
    @person  = Person.new
  end

Which seemed a little ugly to me - no specific reason, just a hunch.

So my question is - are there any patterns for creating a composite
views in Rails?

Cheers,
Nicholas

Hello again:

No answer on this from the list, so I thought I would reword my
question as it might not be that clear. Basically I have a model
"contact" consisting of a number of other models (organization,
person, address). I have a form for creating a "contact" which allows
the end user to enter the organization, person and address information
all at once to create the contact. I guess you can call this a
composite view. I have had a look at a few Rails examples and
tutorials and haven''t seen any examples. I''m sure I can work
it out,
but I was wondering if there was a best practice/pattern for this?

Cheers,
Nicholas

---
Nicholas Henry

FirstHand Web Design -- http://www.firsthand.ca
Landmark Ottawa Stock Photography -- http://www.landmarkottawa.ca

On 7/6/05, Nicholas Henry
<nicholas.henry-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> How do you create a composite view? I have a form based on the model
> "contacts" which consists the following models:
> - organization
> - person
> - address
> 
> I was going to use partials to create the form; e.g:
> - organizations/_form.rhtml
> - people/_form.rhtml .etc
> 
> ...and render them with the appropriate tag:
> 
> <%= render_partial ''people/form'',  @person %>
> 
> I wanted to pass a person  for use with the text field helper:
> 
> <%= text_field ''person'',
''first_name''  %>
> 
> In my contact controller I had to ammend the "new" method to
this:
> 
>   def new
>     @contact = Contact.new
>     @person  = Person.new
>   end
> 
> Which seemed a little ugly to me - no specific reason, just a hunch.
> 
> So my question is - are there any patterns for creating a composite
> views in Rails?
> 
> Cheers,
> Nicholas
>

Since no one else has answered yet, I''ll throw in my own 2 cents.
> How do you create a composite view? I have a form based on the model
> "contacts" which consists the following models:
> - organization
> - person
> - address
> 
> I was going to use partials to create the form; e.g:
> - organizations/_form.rhtml
> - people/_form.rhtml .etc
> ...and render them with the appropriate tag:
> 
> <%= render_partial ''people/form'',  @person %>
I see nothing wrong with that approach.  No sense in having multiple
forms out there all performing function.
 
> I wanted to pass a person  for use with the text field helper:
> 
> <%= text_field ''person'',
''first_name''  %>
> 
> In my contact controller I had to ammend the "new" method to
this:
> 
>   def new
>     @contact = Contact.new
>     @person  = Person.new
>   end
> 
> Which seemed a little ugly to me - no specific reason, just a hunch.
I''m no expert, but I think this has to do with the fact that the form
is reused for ''edit'' (which requires @contact, @person,etc to
be set),
and also used in validation (for repopulating the fields with already
entered data).  If you look at the scaffold code generated by rails,
you''ll see in the forms that they use @contact, @person, etc, and so
for ''new'' to use these partials, it needs to define @model
variables.
> So my question is - are there any patterns for creating a composite
> views in Rails?
I think partials are the way to go.

Elsewhere in your app, render_component may also fullfill this function for you.

Matt