Rails Model Visible Everywhere

Question

Hi I have a rails application with one model that I want to show a loop of in the footer which appears on every page.

In the the Variety Model

class Variety < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :request
end

I have found that adding:

@varieties = Variety.all

to every view works but i am sure this is bad practice.

Answer 1

for this case, it's better to do something like this, in your application controller, you add a before action, so on every action, independent of the controller you are looking for, it will fill the instance variable

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  before_action :fill_varieties

  private

  def fill_varieties
    @varieties = Variety.all
  end

end

and then after this, create a partial on views/layouts/_footer.html.erb

<ul>
  <% @varieties.each do |variety| %>
    <li><%= variety.name %></li>
  <% end %>
</ul>

of course you need to change the view with the code about how you want to show it.

and on your views/layouts/application.html.erb just call the partial

<%= render "layouts/footer" %>

and it will render on every request