What is the difference between the render(:partial => ‘article’) and
render_component?
On Mar 21, 2006, at 2:06, Guest wrote:
What is the difference between the render(:partial => ‘article’) and
render_component?
A partial is just a template, render :partial specifies you want to
render a chunk of view, either from another template, or as view of
some action that has no layout. A partial template has no
corresponding action.
On the other hand render_component means “invoke this action in this
controller with this parameters and include its output here”.
As a rule of thumb, if there’s a reusable piece of template that oly
renders stuff already known to the templates it belongs you factor
that out as a partial. A partial may be suitable also for actions
that only respond to Ajax calls, though there you only use the fact
that there’s no layout. In that case my personal choice is a regular
template with :layout => false.
Otherwise, if that piece of view needs some application logic, like a
shopping cart summary in the main layout of a shop, it is cleaner to
call the shopping cart controller from the layout and delegate the
logic to build that part to the controller that knows about it.
If some piece of view is not reusable but is rendered both as part of
a normal template and as an Ajax call that updates that piece later,
I factor that out as render_component when building the first non-
Ajax response as well.
– fxn