How do I setup the views for nested resources that are displayed as tabs within their parent resource in Rails?

Question

I have a resource Company that has many Projects and People. The index action for the companies displays each company in a table. The show action shows some additional information about it, and then what I'd like to show is another table, with tabs "Projects" and "People".

When I click on the "People" tab, I should go to URL "companies/:id/people", and likewise for the "Projects" tab. I'm not worried about AJAX or pre-loading all of this information into the @company variable during the show action. A simple nested resource is fine.

Now when I'm at "companies/:id/people", it will use PeopleController#index, but I want to show that view (which is JUST it's table, I suppose?) nested within the company's show view. So that when I switch between "companies/:id/people" and "companies/:id/projects", the only thing changing is the table, not the company information around the outside.

Is this sort of thing easily do-able? If Rails isn't build to handle this sort of thing easily, I don't mind using something else. I just don't have much experience with the view layer, so I don't know much about it since I primarily work with JSON.

Answer 1

Basic Example:

ProjectsController && PeopleController:

layout :current_layout

def current_layout
  if @company && @company.persisted? && request.path_parameters[:action] == "index" # i prefer helper 'current_action'
    "company"
  else
    "application"
  end
end

Helper:

def parent_layout(layout)
  @view_flow.set(:layout, self.output_buffer)
  self.output_buffer = render(:file => "layouts/#{layout}")
end

Company layout:

#views/layouts/company.html.erb

<h1><%= @company %></h1>
<ul class="tabs">
 <li>Info</li>
 <li>Info</li>
 <li>Info</li>
</ul>
<%= yield %>
<%= parent_layout(:application) %>

People template:

# views/people/index.html.erb

<% if current_layout == "company" %> # just table
  <%= render "people_table" %>
<% else %>
  <h1>People controller</h3>
  <%= render @people %>
<% end %>

Projects template:

# views/projects/index.html.erb

<% if current_layout == "company" %> # just table
  <%= render "projects_table" %>
<% else %>
  <h1>Projects controller</h3>
  <%= render @projects %>
<% end %>

Answer 2

I suggest you take a look at the rails guides, specifically routing from the outside in.

However rails can handle this, your route would be setup in the following way:

resources :company do
       resource :projects
       resource :people
end

I assume you already have all your CRUD actions setup, then this would work. However do note, it will change your named routes.

i.e

if you were calling

projects_path

in your views, they will now become:

company_projects_path

You can see a full list of routes with the command

rake routes