Rails partials with single-table inheritance

Question

I want to use partials in rails along with single-table inheritance. I currently have this working:

render partial: @vehicle

# which renders the relevant view, depending on object type, eg:
#   views/trucks/_truck.haml
#   views/car/_car.haml

I want to leave these default views in place, and create an additional compact view for each object, perhaps like this

# example code only, I want to write something like:
render partial: 'compact', locals: {vehicle: @vehicle}

# and then have this render (for example) with
#   views/trucks/_compact.haml
#   views/car/_compact.haml

I can happily rename things or change the file names or locations, but what is the simplest way to support two kinds of views (compact and default)?

There will be many more classes later, so looking for very clean, elegant code.

(rails 3.0.5+ on ruby 1.9.2)

Answer 1

To get exactly what you asked for you should do this:

render partial: "#{@vehicle.type.tableize}/#{@vehicle.type.underscore}", object: @vehicle

and you will get rendered:

views/trucks/_truck.html.haml

and the object will be accessible as:

@truck