Geek Mama

Cleaner views with content_for

August 5th, 2010

Episode #8 is all about content_for.  But isn’t content_for deprecated?  ….What?  ….Who said that?

Actually, what’s been deprecated is using an instance variable when accessing a content_for block. For example:

@content_for_#{name_of_the_content_block}

Don’t do that. Do it Ryan’s way.

In fact, the Rails API has some excellent documentation on content_for.

In passing, Ryan mentions that content_for can be used to create dynamic sidebars.  Err, the weblog of PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath go into much more detail in an old post Content for Whom?  Check it out. Good stuff.

Important to remember:

One caveat here is that content_for appends content. It don’t replace it.

Content_for is ignored in caches. So you shouldn’t use it for elements that will be fragment cached.

Since this railscast is an old one, I went looking around to see if this caching problem had been resolved somehow.  Best I could find was this solution from Idle Hacking. Hm.

I really, really like content_for. And I don’t think people use this enough. Instead I’ve been guilty of using if statements in my views… if this, render that, else render this… It can get pretty yucky.  But that caching bit has me concerned.

Entry Filed under: Professional,Railscasts Project,Ruby on Rails