Testing for the existence of templates

[Justin_Wienckowski]

Hey folks,

I’ve run into the need to test for the existence of template files in
several Rails apps I’ve worked on. Particularly in circumstances
where I’m rendering a partial, and use a different partial template
for different sub-classes of a model object. When doing so, I often
test to make sure the template file exists first, and simply skip
that item if no template exists.

So right now I rely on a cludgy and annoying:

File.exist?( File.join( ActionController::Base.template_root,
“layouts”, “some_subdir”, “_%s.rhtml” % method_param ))

Anyone have a better, more elegant (and less hackish) method of doing
this?

-Justin Wienckowski
[email protected]

[Justin_Wienckowski]

On Dec 11, 2007, at 1:41 PM, Justin Wienckowski wrote:

“layouts”, “some_subdir”, “_%s.rhtml” % method_param ))

Anyone have a better, more elegant (and less hackish) method of doing
this?

I discuss some techniques for this in
http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/3/modular-page-assembly-in-rails/

You might consider using request.controller and request.action, and/
or creating a hash of path names so you can centralize @path_names
[‘x’] vs hard coding those directories.

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