Different layouts and routes on single views for a resource

Question

I'm new to rails and have a question regarding layouts and routing in a CMS. I haven't come across an answer on this particular issue after searching the web so I hope someone here could help me.

I'm building a CMS and have to layouts, application.html.erb (default) which is the front public page and admin.html.erb which is available after logging in.

I have resource called Post. Is it possible that only the show view uses the default layout while the rest of the views uses the admin layout?

In other words I want urls to single posts to be like "myAppDomain/posts/1" and use the default layout
while administrative views should have /admin as a prefix and use the admin layout,
like "myAppDomain/admin/posts", "myAppDomain/admin/posts/1/edit"

Now I've set up a route that "adds" the /admin to the posts urls

scope "/admin" do
   resources :posts
end

And in the PostsController I specify to use the admin layout

class PostsController < ApplicationController
   before_filter :authorize , :except => [:show]
   layout 'admin'
   ...

So now people can read posts without logging in, but the links to the single post view on my welcome page is rendered "myAppDomain/admin/posts/1" and it uses the admin layout

<%= link_to post.title, post %>

Is there a way to use different layouts and routes on single views for a resource or should I go for a different approach?

Answer 1

Just specify the layout in the action

def show
    render :layout => 'application'    
end

Answer 2

You can do a before_action

private

def layout_set
  if current_user.admin?
    layout 'admin'
  else
    layout 'default'
  end
end

At the top of the controller:

before_action :layout_set

Now you can forget about adding the layout. You can take it a step further and put the before action in your application controller and you can add that functionality in all your controllers by just adding the same before_action. You save a lot of extra code this way.