Rails partials are great when it comes to rendering a model. But they still seem to have inconsistencies and a room for further improvements.

Consider the following example: we have a model inheritance chain like Message → Message::Text → Message::HTML.

To render both text and HTML messages we need to define both message/texts/text & message/htmls/html partials — even when they are identical and just rendering message.title and message.body.

In the above case we get text & html variables inside the partials, while it's just message for the basic messages/message one. You can't even copy the identical code from one partial into another!

Both texts & HTML end up in views/message, while the basic message goes to views/messages. Thus we get two directories instead of one.

So, meet

This Rails Engine brings you:

1. Nesting directories to respect model namespaces.
2. Consistent variable naming in namespaced partials.
3. Inheritance when a partial is missing.

It provides the above example case with the following partial paths:

messages/message
messages/text/message
messages/html/message

When a model's partial is missing, the parent's one is looked up, upto the basic one.

No explicit code nor configuration needed, just install it!

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "active_model-inherited_partials"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install active_model-inherited_partials

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.