Prepend_view_path not working

[cowboy_x]

Now that controllers can have multiple view paths I’ve been playing with
themes over the weekend. Running into a view issues. I have a
before_filter in the ApplicationController that calls prepend_view_path
to add the path of my theme. I even log the view_paths in an
after_filter to make sure it made it all the way through. The output
looks something like:

/path/to/rails_project/themes/default/views:/path/to/rails_project/app/views

Yet nothing loads. In the docs it says calling prepend_view_path as an
instance method will only effect the current request, which I figured
should be fine. But I tried calling it as a class method as well, which
is supposed to not effect the current request, but all future requests.
Even this isn’t working as expected. Only way I’ve managed to get it to
work is if I don’t ever clean it up. So I keep prepending over and
over, making the path ridiculously long and redundant.

I even installed the darwinweb.net multisite plugin. Same issues. Only
way I could get it to work is if I removed the code that cleaned up
after itself, so the path got out of control.

Right now I’m running this with webrick locally on Leopard 10.5. Is
this just a Leopard bug or am I maybe doing something wrong?

Here is what’s in my before_filter:

prepend_view_path(RAILS_ROOT + ‘/themes/default/views’)

Also tried:

ActionController::Base.prepend_view_path(RAILS_ROOT +
‘/themes/default/views’)

When printed to the log, the paths look great. Any suggestions?

[cowboy_x]

There’s a view_paths accessor method. If you log view_paths does that
show your results as you expect them?

[cowboy_x]

Steve R. wrote:

There’s a view_paths accessor method. If you log view_paths does that
show your results as you expect them?

Yes. I do think in the after_filter to make sure it is there for the
entire page render.

logger.info “soa paths: " + view_paths.join(”:")
logger.info “soa paths: " + ActionController::Base.view_paths.join(”:")

Both of those output:

/path/to/rails_project/themes/default/views:/path/to/rails_project/app/views

Which is perfect. My themes directory comes up before the normal one.

[cowboy_x]

Well, it sounds like the code you should be looking at is in
ActionView, and depending on how fresh your version of Rails is, I’d
be looking in base.rb at the render_file method. Whenever something
like this stumps me, I use logger.debugs just like you are – if you
want to go one more step, try ruby-debug and step through the render
sequence to find out exactly how your template is being located.

Sorry not to be of much help here.

[cowboy_x]

After lots of debugging I found that the fix was incredibly simple and
obvious. I was putting the code in a before_filter block and for some
reason that doesn’t work. Maybe scope issues. But if I put the prepend
right after the class declaration, it works just fine. Even putting it
in a function to be used by a before filter seems to work, as long as
the function remains in the ActionController scope.

[cowboy_x]

Steve R. wrote:

Well, it sounds like the code you should be looking at is in
ActionView, and depending on how fresh your version of Rails is, I’d
be looking in base.rb at the render_file method. Whenever something
like this stumps me, I use logger.debugs just like you are – if you
want to go one more step, try ruby-debug and step through the render
sequence to find out exactly how your template is being located.

Sorry not to be of much help here.

Was running Rails 2.0.1, but upgraded to 2.0.2 to see if it fixed this.
You gave me another direction to look, so I thank you for that. I
generally don’t have to dig into Rails this deep, so I don’t know a lot
of the internals as well as I would like.