Changing view formats in rails 3.1 (delivering mobile html formats, fallback on normal html)

Question

I\'m creating a mobile site next to our normal html site. Using rails 3.1. Mobile site is accessed in subdomain m.site.com.

I have defined mobile format (Mime::Type.

Answer 1

I think I've found the best way to do this. I was attempting the same thing that you were, but then I remembered that in rails 3.1 introduced template inheritance, which is exactly what we need for something like this to work. I really can't take much credit for this implementation as its all laid out there in that railscasts link by Ryan Bates.

So this is basically how it goes.

Create a subdirectory in app/views. I labeled mine mobile.

Nest all view templates you want to override in the same structure format that they would be in the views directory. views/posts/index.html.erb -> views/mobile/posts/index.html.erb

Create a before_filter in your Application_Controller and do something to this effect.

 before_filter :prep_mobile
 def is_mobile?
   request.user_agent =~ /Mobile|webOS|iPhone/
 end 
 def prep_mobile
   prepend_view_path "app/views/mobile" if is_mobile?
 end

Once thats done, your files will default to the mobile views if they are on a mobile device and fallback to the regular templates if a mobile one is not present.