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

Rails 4.1 includes a pretty neat feature:

Variants

Allows you to have different templates and action responses for the same mime type (say, HTML). This is a magic bullet for any Rails app that's serving mobile clients. You can now have individual templates for the desktop, tablet, and phone views while sharing all the same controller logic.

Now you can do something like this:

class PostController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @post = Post.find(params[:id])

    respond_to do |format|
      format.json
      format.html               # /app/views/posts/show.html.erb
      format.html.phone         # /app/views/posts/show.html+phone.erb
      format.html.tablet do
        @show_edit_link = false
      end
    end
  end
end

You simply need to set the variant depending on your needs, for example within a before_filter:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_action :detect_device_variant

  private

    def detect_device_variant
      case request.user_agent
      when /iPad/i
        request.variant = :tablet
      when /iPhone/i
        request.variant = :phone
      end
    end
end

What's new in Rails 4.1