Comments on: Nested Layouts in Rails

By: Vered

Vered — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:27:00 +0000

Just wanted to say THANKS for your great solution – exactly what I needed.
Works perfect!

By: Steven Parkes

Steven Parkes — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:17:00 +0000

I didn't need a new nested layout for every controller, just a few. Well, one to start. Simply wrapping the render :partial with a block and catching the MissingTemplate, where you drop back to yield, (seems to) work great:

<%= begin; render :partial => "layouts/#{controller.controller_name}"; rescue ActionView::MissingTemplate; yield; end %>

By: Weyus

Weyus — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:16:00 +0000

You can take this a step further.

If you want to mix and match your "layouts" (which are really just partials, let's face it) across arbitrary controller/action pairs, you can just define a special variable, say @inner_layout.

And then in each action that you want to use the inner layout, you just define it.

So in your application.html.erb:

<%= @inner_layout ? render(:partial => "layouts/#{@inner_layout}") : yield %>

If there's an inner "layout" (partial) then render it (assuming that it will yield), and if there isn't one, just go ahead and yield.

And then in the appropriate action(s):

@inner_layout = 'some_inner_layout_filename'.

Although the variable thing is a bit of a drag, you could take this as far as you want.