How can I define templates for multiple controllers

Question

I have some nice lean controllers. To further DRY them up, I would like them to share views: so that multiple controllers use the same edit and new views. So I have created a directory of templates called resources which contains a generic edit and new view.

I have multiple controllers that I would like to share these views (they have their own show templates and forms). Each of these controllers currently inherits from a base ResourceController. By default, if any of these controllers is missing a view, Rails will follow the inheritance chain looking for a view, so if my NewsItems controller doesn't have an edit template, Rails will automagically look for one in resources. However, I would like to remove the need for all these controllers to inherit from a single controller. In my case this adds an extra controller into the inheritance chain which I don't want to do. I would prefer to move the resource introspection shared by the controllers into a mixin.

However, doing so will mean Rails no longer looks in the resources view directory for missing templates.

I don't want to render the same 'resources/editandresources/new` templates in every controller, so is there a way of declaring which template to use for which action in a declarative way? Preferably in the mixin?

Answer 1

It sounds like you may be looking for prepend_view_path. So with that you can have e.g. a MyResources concern module you include in your controllers:

module MyResources
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  included do
    prepend_view_path File.join('app', 'views', 'resources')
  end
end

Then in any controller that you include MyResources, the first path to check for view templates will be app/views/resources/, followed by the usual locations.