How to change search order for render a partial in plugin/engine in rails3?

Question

I'm writing a modular project in Rails3, and I've this issue.

I've my main project, and I want to implement part of it with differentes customizations, so I'm using Engine, so I've:

- app
  - views
    - shared
      - _header.html.erb     <-- This one is called
  - ...
- config
- ...
- vendors
  - plugins
    - myplugin
      - app
        - views
          - controller1
            - action1.html.erb
          - shared
            - _header.html.erb       <--- I want to render this!

But if from action1.html.erb I call

<%= render 'shared/header' %>

the first _header.html.erb is called, I want to call "before" the one in myplugin. Can I do it only for views in myplugin?

This allows me to prevent a lot of usless "namespacing".

Answer 1

We had exactly the same problem and came up with something like this:

def self.prioritize_engine_view_paths!(engine)
  self.view_paths = engine.paths["app/views"].existent + MyApp::Application.paths["app/views"].existent
end

It's defined in ApplicationController of the main app and then it's called in ApplicationController of every engine:

module MyEngine
  class ApplicationController < ::ApplicationController
    prioritize_engine_view_paths!(MyEngine::Engine)
  end
end

[EDIT] In Rails 3.2.0 it will be much easier:

config.railties_order = [Blog::Engine, :main_app, :all]

See https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/40b19e063592fc30705f17aafe6a458e7b622ff2 for details.