regarding using render in ruby on rails

Question

I am new to rails and still working on fundamentals, so any tips and advice are greatly appreciated!

I've made a functional contact page on a website, and I would like to be able to render the form and functionality of inside a tab on a different page. I have the following code in the static_pages folder in my views folder:

<div id="tabs">
 <ul>
    <li><a href="#tabs-1">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="#tabs-5">Contact</a></li>
 </ul>
  <div id="tabs-1">
   <%= render "shared/about"%>
</div>
 <div id="tabs-5">
   <%= render "contact/new"%>
 </div>

where <%= render "contact/new"%> corresponds to the new.html.erb file in contact in views.

the relevant code inside my routes.rb is

match 'contact' => 'contact#new', :as => 'contact', :via => :get
match 'contact' => 'contact#create', :as => 'contact', :via => :post

and here is my controller:

 class ContactController < ApplicationController

  def new
    @message = Message.new
  end

  def create
    @message = Message.new(params[:message])

    if @message.valid?
      NotificationsMailer.contact_pr(@message).deliver
      redirect_to(root_path, :notice => "Message was successfully sent.")
    else
      flash.now.alert = "Please fill all fields."
     render :new
    end
  end
end

However, It seems that whatever I try I still am unable to render the form. I apologize if this is a very simple question, and I am mostly interested in getting better at fundamentals in Ruby on Rails so any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to render this form in other templates (and you do), you should extract it to partial named for example: _form.html.erb.

Then, you should put

<%= render 'contact/form' %>

everywhere you need this partial in view (including new.html.erb template). When you are done with this, you should leave

render :new

in controller, as it works a little bit different than in view and it renders appropriate action template instead of partial. Of course, you need to set @message variable everywhere you need this partial. Or, you can put in your partial:

<%= form_for(@message || Message.new) do |f| %>

More info about layouts and rendering here.