How do you handle widgets in rails?
StackOverflow, for example, has a user's reputation displayed up top. Clearly, this is grabbed from the database, and it's displayed on every page. Of course, this isn't in every controller action on every page, because that would be incredibly redundant.
How do you handle this kind of situation in rails? The only way I can think of it is to use before_filter
s to pass the models into the page, but that just seems like abuse 开发者_如何学JAVAof that feature. There seems to be the cells gem that does what I want, but I'd imagine this is a common problem and there must be a simple solution for it in rails without having to resort to plugins or gems.
What you are looking for is the layout. In rails this is where you define headers, footers, and sidebars that frame your site. Look for app/views/layouts/application.html.erb in your generated rails code. Towards the bottom you will see:
<body>
<%= yield %>
</body>
The yield is where rest of the app gets invoked. Everything before and after the yield will appear on every page. So, using your example, you might query the database and set the instance variable @reputation in the application controller:
@reputation = User.find( current_user ).reputation
then display it in the layout like this:
<body>
<%= @reputation %>
<%= yield %>
</body>
This is covered thoroughly in the book "Agile Web Development With Rails". If you are going to develop in Rails I recommend getting the latest edition.
I would just make a partial with the widget in it and render it in the layout(s) where you want it to appear. Let it do whatever it needs to do, eg connect to the db, run some js to connect to an external site, etc.
If you're concerned about optimisation then deal with it when it becomes a problem.
I guess, you can put the code you need into a view helper. And then render some partial, like it was said before, in the layouts where you want it to appear, calling helper's function. Look here: Rails view helpers in helper file
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