ActionView: render a layout not in app/views?

Rails
1

Hey there,
I have a problem.

class ApplicationController
layout :determine_layout

def determine_layout
“…/…/public/sites/#{@site.code}/application”
end
end

in rails2.0 this worked, but it was clearly a hack.

I tried to fix it in a few ways;

  1. symlink public/sites -> app/views/layouts/sites
  • this breaks because the Dir.glob used to find view files doesnt work
    for subfolders of a symlink
  1. set ApplicationController.view_paths << “public/sites”
  • this doesnt quite seem to work.
  1. manually fix rails and work out the best way to patch it for 2.2.1
  • this seemed to work, but isn’t quite plugin-able as a fix

mostly I’m wondering,
what is the right way to do this?

MatthewRudy

2

Quite often I’m tasked with doing something very similar. Check out my
solution:

class ExperiencesController < ApplicationController
self.view_paths << File.join(RAILS_ROOT, “cms”, “experiences”)

def show
render :layout => “1/layout”
end
end

requiring a folder structure like:
RAILS_ROOT/
app/
cms/
experiences/
1/
layout.html.erb
config/
…

Does that help?

On Oct 14, 4:25 pm, Matthew R. Jacobs <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-

3

Andrew B. wrote:

Quite often I’m tasked with doing something very similar. Check out my
solution:

class ExperiencesController < ApplicationController
self.view_paths << File.join(RAILS_ROOT, “cms”, “experiences”)

def show
render :layout => “1/layout”
end
end

requiring a folder structure like:
RAILS_ROOT/
app/
cms/
experiences/
1/
layout.html.erb
config/
…

Does that help?

On Oct 14, 4:25�pm, Matthew R. Jacobs <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-

Hey thanks andrew,
that’s the same thing I’m trying to achieve,
although the code as such won’t quite work in Rails 2.1.1

it’ll give you errors about “found a view path that is not in the right
format”

the correct way is
append_view_path(…)

and you pointed out my error

I was doing;
append_view_path(“public/sites”)

while actually what is required;
append_view_path(File.join(Rails.root, “public”, “sites”))

works great, it seems.
Thanks.

4

Matthew R. Jacobs wrote:
tthew Rudy J. <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-

Hey thanks andrew,
that’s the same thing I’m trying to achieve,
although the code as such won’t quite work in Rails 2.1.1

it’ll give you errors about “found a view path that is not in the right
format”

the correct way is
append_view_path(…)

and you pointed out my error

I was doing;
append_view_path(“public/sites”)

while actually what is required;
append_view_path(File.join(Rails.root, “public”, “sites”))

works great, it seems.
Thanks.

Wrote a quick blog post about this;
http://rudygems.com/post/54730156/rendering-layouts-that-live-in-public