Rails Ruby on Rails → 2.x

Suggestion

I suggest to parameterize 'smart' partials rendering like that:

<%= render :partial => @cart.products, :context => 'cart' %>

which would be an equivalent to something like that:

<%= render :partial => 'products/product_for_cart', :collection => @cart.products %>

Justification

In the snippet below all product, category and cart pages (in a standard 'category has many products' scenario) display the same views/products/_product.html.erb partial.

# views/products/show.html.erb
<%= render @products, :locals => {:context => 'product'} %>

# views/categories/show.html.erb
<%= render @category.products, :locals => {:context => 'category'} %>

# views/shopping_cart/show.html.erb
<%= render @cart.products, :locals => {:context => 'cart'} %>

This leads to overly complicated views/products/_product.html.erb logic of what and how to display that depends on context. I found that readability is more important than DRY sometimes and I usually end up with a series of partials:

views/products/_product.html.erb
views/products/_category_product.html.erb
views/products/_cart_product.html.erb

and render them appropriately:

<%= render :partial => 'products/category_product', :collection => @category.products %>

I suggest to improve smart partials by parameterizing their rendering a-la:

<%= render :partial => @cart.products, :context => 'cart' %>

which would be an equivalent to

<%= render :partial => 'products/product_for_cart', :collection => @cart.products %>