The View Part 1 - ERB and Links

Rails uses the Model-View-Controller architecture. I have already discussed the model (here) and the controller (here); today it is the turn of the view.

The render method usually (depending on the parameters, as discussed with controllers) opens up a file, parses the file through ERB, and sends the result back to the requesting web browser. There really is not much more to it than that. The only complications are HTML and control structures.

As the web browser is expecting an HTML formatted page, your ERB template must be in HTML. Generally this is split between two files - the layout and the view itself - with the layout having the header and footer (both in the HTML sense, and the generic stuff at the top and bottom of all your pages), and the view having the HTML specific to that view. You really do need a good knowledge of HTML to do anything beyond the basics, but if you can cope with Ruby, HTML is dead easy.

ERB
ERB (embedded Ruby) is a template system built into the Ruby standard library, and used by Rails. It takes a template string, and where it finds certain codes will perform Ruby processing, substituting the output of that with the codes in the template. Here is an example IRb session using ERB:

require 'ERB'
template = ERB.new 'My template is called <%= @name %>'
@name = 'Fred'
puts template.result(binding)

The first line points the interpreter to the ERB.rb file (as this is in the standard library, not the core library). The second line creates a new ERB object called template. The last line calls the results method on template. The binding parameter gives the context so the template uses the value of @name from here, rather than some other method.

ERb supports a number of tags. Your Ruby code should go between the tags.

<% %> Perform the Ruby code; no output
<%= %> Perform the Ruby code; output the result
<%=h %> Perform the Ruby code; output the HTML escaped result
<%# %> Comment (note that unlike an HTML comment this is not visible to a visitor looking at the HTML source)

A % at the begining of the line can also be used to indicate that the line is ruby code (escape with %%). This appears to not be used conventionally. Also, <%% or %%> are replaced with <% or %> respectively, presumably to make it easier to write pages about ERb.

Actually, <%=h some_ruby_code %> is a bit of a trick. It is actually a method call, for the h method. It could be written <%= h(some_ruby_code) %>; it is just the same.

Reference
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/

ERB and Rails
Rails already includes ERB, so the require 'ERB' is not required.

The layout file, pehaps application.html.erb, must include a call to the yield method, like this:
<%= yield %>

The yield uses the view file, perhaps edit.html.erb, parsing it with ERB, and inserting the result into layout result.

All this processing is done in your controller's superclass (ActionController::Base), so the environment used (the binding) is that of the method in your controller. ERB can access any variables and methods that you can inside that method.

Links
ActionController::Base includes some methods to help with links. The link_to method will generate the HTML code for a simple link, as in this example:

<%= link_to 'New post', new_post_path %>

"New post" is the text that will appear in the link. The method new_post_path will generate the URL on the fly (and will take into account the current URL; if the web browser is at http://mydomain.com/, your page will require a different URL to http://mydomain.com/posts/index).

As well as link_to there are also button_to, link_to_if and link_to_unless methods.

API for link_to (with links to alternatives)
http://www.railsapi.org:8100/actionview-helpers-urlhelper-link_to