Rendering arrays with elements of different types without using default partial?

Question

I get an array of search results from tire, containing objects of various activemodel types, and I need to render each to a string. Currently, I am doing this with a loop over these results calling render_to_string(result) on each. This uses the default partial for that activemodel object.

However, this requires that I set the default partial for every class I want to be searchable to be the representation for search. This means that everywhere else in the code I need to explicitly render a collection (all of the same type) I need to explicitly specify to render with my general-use partial, when really that general use partial should be the default. It also raises the question of what I would do if I needed to render a different collection of various types, as it would use the same partials as the search.

What I would really like would be to be able to pass a prefix to render_to_string that would tell it to look for the default partial, but inside this directory - which would mean I can keep my search partials separate while still being able easily render the objects.

Is there a way of doing that or some other better solution?

Have you tried things like render_to_string([:search, result])? — Iain
– Iain, Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 8:26
I like the idea, but I get ':search' is not an ActiveModel-compatible object that returns a valid partial path. — Jords
– Jords, Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 8:59

TomDunning · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-25 22:21:34Z

1

I'd call:

 render_to_string :partial => 'searches/result', :collection => @results

And then within that one partial determine how the individual results should be displayed by doing:

case result.class.name
when 'Foo'
...
end

This gives me a single location for the format and display of results.

answered Jun 25, 2012 at 22:21

TomDunning

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4 Comments

Jords Over a year ago

I'll give this a try, I would prefer to do a prefix sort of thing and have separate partials but this is certainly far better than my current solution :)

TomDunning Over a year ago

Sub the stuff within the 'when' clause into seperate partials perhaps?

Jords Over a year ago

I guess I could build the partial name from the class name and render it using that

Jords Over a year ago

I wrote a partial with: = render :partial => "search_#{search_result.class.name.downcase}", :object => search_result and it worked great. Thanks :)

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