Testing for the existence of templates

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey folks,

I've run into the need to test for the existence of template files in several Rails apps I've worked on. Particularly in circumstances where I'm rendering a partial, and use a different partial template for different sub-classes of a model object. When doing so, I often test to make sure the template file exists first, and simply skip that item if no template exists.

So right now I rely on a cludgy and annoying:

File.exist?( File.join( ActionController::Base.template_root, "layouts", "some_subdir", "_%s.rhtml" % method_param ))

Anyone have a better, more elegant (and less hackish) method of doing this?

-Justin Wienckowski jwinky@stacksafe.com

2

I discuss some techniques for this in http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/3/modular-page-assembly-in-rails/

You might consider using request.controller and request.action, and/or creating a hash of path names so you can centralize @path_names['x'] vs hard coding those directories.