So I am working on a small project to exercise my new Rails brain muscles. And just as I start to feel good, I run into a problem.

Defining a layout

In rails you can very easily define a layout. This layout - if named after a controller - makes all views of that controller invoke the layout.
Only if the layout has “yield” in it will you see the actual view you wanted.
The exact syntax is :

<%= yield :layout %>

My Problem

Well, I wrote a controller “manager” with a layout.
Now, I want to make that layout over all the application.
This means - if I invoke an action of another controller, I want the layout to remain the same. This is a reasonable demand, and is actually explained in the book.

What you need to do is write

layout "layout_name"

in my case it will be

layout "manager"

in the ApplicationController. But it didn’t work!

The Pothole

My new controller was a scaffold. A scaffold has an auto-generated layout.
So if my scaffold is “project”, I will have “project.html.erb” in the layouts folder.

It seems that as long you don’t delete the controller’s layout, it will not use the manually defined layout.

In my case - Rails will keep using “project.html.erb” and not “manager.html.erb” even though I defined

layout "manager"

. Once I deleted the project.html.erb, everything worked fine.

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