October 12, 2024 | Web Development | Mohit Goyal

Views And Layouts In Rails: Building User Interfaces

When the topic of Ruby on Rails comes to developing web applications, an intuitive, efficient user interface is standard. User interfaces built using Rails perform redundantly with robust Ruby on Rails hosting services. 

In Rails, the presentation layer refers to views and layouts that structure and style your web pages. To ensure efficient rendering and smooth visual output, especially for high-performance applications such as 3D rendering and AI tasks, an affordable GPU server cost is considered. It is similar for developers who use Rails’ Views and Layout—the process where they learn how all of these pieces work together to build dynamic, well-organized, and maintainable user interfaces.

We know developers are looking to know more Rails views and layouts, so here’s the solution. This article explains how views and layouts work, how they interact with controllers and models, and also includes some other essential strategies for effective use in your application to enrich the UI of the application.

The role of Rails hosting providers

Views and layouts render with ease in a Rails application. Rails hosting providers thus offer reliable servers, optimized infrastructure, and good tools to get an application user interface out within the shortest time possible without hindrances. 

Features for enhancement of Views and Layouts in Rails by hosting providers

With the ideal hosting partner, you can enhance your views feature. A reliable Rails hosting provider offers: 

1. Caching: It is a mechanism by which data, as accessed locally, is cached as much as possible. This reduces the fetching of data from the server and thus improves the page load time.
2. Asset Pipeline: The asset pipeline provides optimization and compression for your CSS and JavaScript files, which makes the file size smaller and delivers it quite quickly to the browser.
3. CDN Integration: Most web hosts offer simple integration with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which distribute your application's static content across multiple globally distributed servers. This, therefore, offers a lower latency for users in different regions.
4. Database Optimization: Rails hosting providers are usually equipped with a wide range of tools and expertise to ensure database performance; the data retrieval is efficient, and hence leads to fast page rendering.

Understanding Views in Rails

In Rails, views are responsible for displaying data to users. Since most of the fields are going to be filled with content, views are templates whose fields are filled in with content HTML. They even include embedded Ruby, which is code that's put in them to print out information dynamically from a database or other parts of the application.

How Views Work in Rails

• Location: Views in general are held within the application in the app/views directory. For every controller defined in Rails, there is a subdirectory within views holding special view templates defined for that controller.

• File Naming Convention: Typically, the naming convention of views is from the controller action to which it is associated. If you have a show action for ArticlesController, then you would have a corresponding view template at app/views/articles/show.html.erb.

• Rendering Data in Views: Views can add dynamic content inside an HTML structure by using ERB or any other templating language, such as Haml or Slim. This is an example of applying ERB within view templates so they can render data from an article object:

<h1><%= @article.title %></h1>

<p><%= @article.body %></p>

The <%= %> syntax is used to output data.

The @article variable is passed from the controller to the view so that it can be accessed in the view to be displayed.

Partials in Rails Views

Partials DRY up your views with common code reusability. You don't need to duplicate identical code across various views. You can extract it into a partial and include it where you need.

Creating a Partial

A partial is a view file that generally includes an underscore, _. So, if you have a form you know you'll use both inside new view and edit view, the first thing to do is to break the form out into a partial:

<!-- app/views/articles/_form.html.erb -->

<%= form_with(model: @article) do |form| %>

  <div>

    <%= form.label :title %>

    <%= form.text_field :title %>

  </div>

  <div>

    <%= form.label :body %>

    <%= form.text_area :body %>

  </div>

  <%= form.submit %>

<% end %>

Rendering a Partial:

To render the partial in your views, you use the render method:

<!-- app/views/articles/new.html.erb -->

<h1>New Article</h1>

<%= render 'form' %>

Partials make your views more modular and, hence, more manageable, so that you can modify or update UI components in one place.

Helper Methods for Views

Rails offers you a range of helper methods that you can apply to your views to make them concise and to the point. These helpers help in generating links, forms, and a lot of other common HTML elements.

Examples of Helper Methods:

• link_to: This method creates an HTML anchor (<a>) tag. 

For example:

<%= link_to 'Show Article', article_path(@article) %>

• form_with: It creates forms. Generally used for creating new records or updating old ones:

For example:

<%= form_with(model: @article) do |form| %>

  <%= form.label :title %>

  <%= form.text_field :title %>

<% end %>

Custom view helpers

You may define your own helper methods that can help keep your views even cleaner. These often go in the app/helpers directory and are available to any view.

Defining and creating a Custom Helper

You might want to create a helper to format dates like this:

# app/helpers/application_helper.rb

module ApplicationHelper

  def formatted_date(date)

    date.strftime("%B %d, %Y")

  end

end

Now, you can use this helper in your views:

<p>Published on: <%= formatted_date(@article.published_at) %></p>

Understanding Layouts in Rails

Layouts in Rails give a way to wrap your views in a common template. They enable defining such a general structure of your application's pages—headers, footers, and navigation bars. You wouldn't have to duplicate the same code in every view.

How Layouts Work in Rails

By default, Rails appends to an application.html.erb layout found at app/views/layouts/. It wraps every view that the controller renders in a common structure for all pages of your application.

Example of a very simple layout file:

<!-- app/views/layouts/application.html.erb -->

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

  <head>

    <title>MyRailsApp</title>

    <%= csrf_meta_tags %>

    <%= csp_meta_tag %>

    <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'application', media: 'all' %>

    <%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %>

  </head>

  <body>

    <header>

      <h1>My Rails Application</h1>

      <%= link_to 'Home', root_path %>

      <%= link_to 'Articles', articles_path %>

    </header>

    <%= yield %>

    <footer>

      <p>Footer content goes here</p>

    </footer>

  </body>

</html>

yield:

In other words, the yield keyword is where the particular view is going to be injected. For instance, if it were articles/show.html.erb, it is going to replace its content in the layout of the yield section while rendering.

Multiple Layouts in Rails

Although the application layout is the default layout, you can still use a different layout for parts of your application. Rails allows this by letting you declare and use multiple layouts by informing the controller which one to use.

Specifying a Layout in a Controller:

You can decide that a particular controller or action should use a particular layout by calling the layout method in the controller:

class AdminController < ApplicationController

  layout "admin"

  def dashboard

    # Action logic

  end

end

This will use the admin.html.erb layout found at app/views/layouts/.

Conditional Layouts:

You can also have multiple layouts and apply them conditionally according to the logic:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  layout :choose_layout

  private

  def choose_layout

    current_user.admin? ? "admin" : "application"

  end

end

Asset Pipeline in Views

The asset pipeline in Rails tracks all JavaScript, CSS, and image files. These are pretty vital for building new user interfaces. You can include these assets inside your views and layouts with the help of Rails helpers.

Including Stylesheets and JavaScript:

Chances are high that you have come across the following lines of code in your application.html.erb layout file. These are applied to include the application's stylesheet and JavaScript files.

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'application', media: 'all' %>

<%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %>

Rails will automatically compile and serve it through the asset pipeline.

Rendering JSON Views for APIs

Most views in Rails are HTML-based, but in Rails, you can also render the JSON for an API. Instead of an HTML template, you can render JSON directly from your controller:

ndef show

  @article = Article.find(params[:id])

  render json: @article

end

Alternatively, you can define a .json.jbuilder template to format your JSON output more precisely:

# app/views/articles/show.json.jbuilder

json.extract! @article, :id, :title, :body, :created_at, :updated_at

json.author do

  json.name @article.author.name

end

Quick Overview of Views and Layouts in Rails

Summarizing Views and Layouts in Rails

Views and layouts are also important in Rails because they are the primary movers of the work from the framework itself. This in turn presents well-structured, dynamic, and highly interactive user interfaces. Views take care of how to present data for a user, while layouts give you the structural skeleton holding together the look and feel of different parts of an application. In short, while content has to be presented consistently across all pages, they are flexible and adapt to various needs.

Using partials, developers reuse common things across views without redundancy, making it easier to maintain a codebase. At the same time, layouts provide a central template in which to embed views so that the overall structure of the application is always uniform. 

For developers, that's where the craftsmanship begins and how these pieces work together. It is what makes a web application scalable, maintainable, and responsive, regardless of whether you are doing something as simple as creating a little personal blog or a complex enterprise-level application. Mastery of views, layouts, and their related features will help you create an efficient, user-friendly interface, adapting seamlessly to your users' needs.

© All rights reserved by Mohit Goyal

© All rights reserved by Mohit Goyal | Inspired Monks 2024