Development, Ruby On Rails - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 14:03 - 0 Comments

Multiple layouts within the same controller in Ruby on Rails

Using more than one layout in a controller is as simple as placing the following code in your controller:

layout :choose_layout

private
def choose_layout
  if [ 'signup', 'login' ].include? action_name
    'login'
  else
    'admin'
  end
end

When Rails goes to select the layout it wont find one named “choose_layout”, so it will look for an action with that name instead.

The action checks if the Rails variable action_name (which contains the name of the current action) matches either ’signup’ or ‘login’. If this is true then the ‘login’ layout is rendered otherwise ‘admin’ is.

From Paul Sturgess