One of the things that I like about the .net web application setup is the concept of Master Pages. The most common usage of this is if you have a Home Page that has a slightly different layot from the rest of the site, but you want to share the base DIV structure and assets without having to copy them into another layout… Keep it DRY!
Although there is no “out of the box” solution for sharing common layout setups in Rails except for using Partials, there is in fact a way of replicating this functionality. First, you need to be familiar with the ActionView::Helpers::CaptureHelper class and the methods in it.
So, what you do is create a container rhtml layout that contains the common layout elements, such as the base HTML and div structure.
container.rhtml
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<body>
<%= yield :layout -%>
</div>
</body>
</html>
From there, you can create as many other layouts that reference that container, such as one called application.rhtml:
<% @content_for_layout = capture do %>
<div id='a_new_div' />
<%= yield :layout %>
<% end %>
<%= render 'layouts/container', { 'content_for_layout' => @content_for_layout } %>
Note what happens there – the capture method is used to catch the rendering of this layout file. Then, instead of just allowing it to render, this output is injected into the container.rhtml file. In this way, we have chained the inner layout (application.rhtml) into the outer (container.rhtml) layout.
In our example, the “<div id=’a_new_div’ />” will be injected, along with the data from the view, into the container. There is nothing stopping you from doing this to another layer, although I doubt how often you’d need to do that!
From our example above, we could also easily create a home.rhtml file that had slightly different layout from our application.rhtml file and use that from our HomeController without concern – all of the pages would then render in the correct layout while giving us the benefit of a shared outer container!
I have used this in production, and it works a treat both in terms of performance and code maintainability.