Rails 3 - Ideal way to set title of pages

Question

Whats the proper way to set the page title in rails 3. Currently I\'m doing the following:

app/views/layouts/application.html:

Answer 1

I have a somewhat more complicated solution. I want to manage all of my titles in my locale files. I also want to include meaningful titles for show and edit pages such that the name of the resource is included in the page title. Finally, I want to include the application name in every page title e.g. Editing user Gustav - MyApp.

To accomplish this I create a helper in application_helper.rb which does most of the heavy lifting. This tries to get a name for the given action from the locale file, a name for the assigned resource if there is one and combines these with the app name.

# Attempt to build the best possible page title.
# If there is an action specific key, use that (e.g. users.index).
# If there is a name for the object, use that (in show and edit views).
# Worst case, just use the app name
def page_title
  app_name = t :app_name
  action = t("titles.#{controller_name}.#{action_name}", default: '')
  action += " #{object_name}" if object_name.present?
  action += " - " if action.present?
  "#{action} #{app_name}"
end

# attempt to get a usable name from the assigned resource
# will only work on pages with singular resources (show, edit etc)
def object_name
  assigns[controller_name.singularize].name rescue nil
end

You will need to add action specific texts in your locale files in the following form:

# en.yml 
titles:
  users:
    index: 'Users'
    edit: 'Editing'

And if you want to use meaningful resource names in your singular views you may need to add a couple of proxy methods, e.g.

# User.rb
def name
  username
end