I’m finding a pattern in many of my Rails application’s which is:
views that change depending on the role of the person using the
application. For example, an admin sees one view and an assistant
sees another view. Many elements may be the same but critical
elements change.
I’m finding drying up the code to display different view elements
(links, blocks, etc.) is not easy. I can keep actions from being
executed at the controller level, but morphing the views to remove
elements not intended for the user is not simple. I’m finding that
having separate templates for each role is the safest thing to do,
but that isn’t dry at all. I can imagine a series of templates which
refine the accessibility of the elements, but that seems like a lot
of files and a system is that is not easily maintained.
What is the best practice for drying up role-based views?
I was reading about aspect oriented programming and how it can be
used to layer functionality upon classes. Does this seem like a
possible way of layering additional functionality to views? I wonder
to what degree Rails and Ruby already are already capable of doing
aspect oriented programming of which I’m not aware.
Jose
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Jose Hales-Garcia
UCLA Department of Statistics
[email protected]