Make Rails look for .mobile files in subdirectory?

Question

I'm using the mobile fu gem to do some user-agent detection, so that I can serve either .html or .mobile extension templates depending on the client,

Now, this part works really good, but I don't like that view folders become a bit cluttered with twice the files, ie.

app/views/profiles/show.mobile.haml

app/views/profiles/show.html.haml

app/views/profiles/edit.mobile.haml

app/views/profiles/edit.html.haml

etc, etc

what I'd like to have instead is:

app/views/profiles/html/show.html.haml

app/views/profiles/html/edit.html.haml

And

app/views/profiles/mobile/show.mobile.haml

app/views/profiles/mobile/edit.mobile.haml

And have Rails automatically look into the correct folder/directory for files depending on the Request. Is this possible to do?

Maybe this is something really easy to do, let me know if this is a behavior that comes out of the box..

Thank you

Answer 1

Rails 4.1 has a new built-in feature called ActionPack Variants, which detects the user-agent (like the mobile fu gem).

Basically, you can add this for example in your ApplicationController:

before_action :detect_device_format

private

def detect_device_format
  case request.user_agent
  when /iPad/i
    request.variant = :tablet
  when /iPhone/i
    request.variant = :phone
  when /Android/i && /mobile/i
    request.variant = :phone
  when /Android/i
    request.variant = :tablet
  when /Windows Phone/i
    request.variant = :phone
  end
end

Let's say you have a ProfilesController. Now you can do this:

class ProfilesController < ApplicationController
  def index
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html          # /app/views/profiles/index.html.erb
      format.html.phone    # /app/views/profiles/index.html+phone.erb
      format.html.tablet   # /app/views/profiles/index.html+tablet.erb
    end
  end
end

Back to your question: If you want to look for files in a different folder/directory, you can do this:

format.html.phone { render 'mobile/index' }   # /app/views/mobile/index.html+phone.erb

There is also a good tutorial which shows how to use it.