Last Updated on November 30, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
Where you place your render layout in your method matters.
I was debugging a piece of code that definitely was not giving me the results I expected. I was using a render layout with an alternate style instead of application.html.erb since this was a popup. I did not need the headers, footers and navigation in the popup. I included the following in my edit method:
render :layout => ‘alternate_style’
In order to troubleshoot I initialized a variable called $temp2 before getting to the edit method. I put the following at the bottom of my form in order to see the variable (yes I could do that with a debugger and get similar results)
$temp2 <%= $temp2 %>
In the method, I set $temp2 to something like ‘tropical.
What I found was that if I put the render before setting the variable, the variable would not change the first time I opened the form. I had to open it again. In other words the following would not work the first time
render :layout => ‘alternate_style’
$temp2 = ‘tropical’
However, if I flipped things around to the following it did work as expected.
$temp2 = ‘tropical’
render :layout => ‘alternate_style’
My edit method now looks something like
def edit
@produced_roll = ProducedRoll.find(roll_id)
$temp2 = ‘tropical’ # TODO remove after debugging
$current_sheet_line = params[:current_sheet_line]
@sheet_line = SheetLine.find(sheet_line_id)
render :layout => ‘alternate_style’
end
Putting the render :layout at the end seems to ensure that the rest of the method is executed before displaying the form.