Template files
So far we’ve defined our templates as strings right inside our route. That worked well because our templates were ridiculously small. Of course, any real application will have much bigger templates. Managing these inside our routes would get pretty messy pretty quickly.
It is, therefore, better to store them in separate files. And again, Sinatra
has built-in support for that: when we call the method erb with a symbol
instead of a string, then Sinatra assumes this is part of a filename, and
it will look for a template file in a directory views.
Let’s create a new directory views, and add a file monstas.erb, containing
our template:
<h1>Hello <%= name %></h1>
Also, add a file layout.erb with our layout template:
<html><body><%= yield %></body></html>
Now we are ready to change our route as follows:
get '/monstas/:name' do
erb :monstas, { :locals => params, :layout => :layout }
end
Restart your application, and reload the page. You should see the same result.
But our code looks much better this way, doesn’t it?
Interestingly, we don’t even need the name the layout. Sinatra looks for this filename by default (we could specify a different name though, in case we need different layout templates in different contexts):
get '/monstas/:name' do
erb :monstas, { :locals => params, :layout => true }
end
And finally, we can also even totally omit the option, because Sinatra
assumes we want a layout and finds one in the views directory:
get '/monstas/:name' do
erb :monstas, { :locals => params }
end
If we don’t want a layout, for some reason, then we can pass :layout => false
instead.
Neat.