Trouble on rendering a template passing a local variable

Question

I am running Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to render a template (show.html.erb) passing a local variable.

In RAILS_ROOT/views/users/show.html.erb I have

Name: <%= @user.name %>
Surname: <%= @user.surname %>

I have also a page controller to handle pages and in the application_controller.rb an istance of @current_user. A page is called user, so in RAILS_ROOT/views/pages/user.html.erb I have

<%= render :template => "users/show", :locals => { :user => @current_user } %>

The above code doesn't work (I get this error: RuntimeError in Pages#user, Called id for nil, which would mistakenly be 4 -- if you really wanted the id of nil, use object_id) but this works:

<%= render :template => "users/show", :locals => { :user => @user = @current_user } %>

I think it is not a good approach to "overwrite" the @user variable. This is because, for example, if I need to recall @user after the above 'render' statement it will don't work anymore.

So, what is a solution in order to render show.html.erb?

---

I tryed also

<%= render :template => "users/show", :locals => { @user => @current_user } %>
<%= render :template => "users/show", :locals => { :object => @current_user, :as => @user }

but those don't work.

---

UPDATE

If in pages_controller.rb I put this

def user
  @user ||= @current_user
end

it will work and in the view files you can just use

<%= render :template => "users/show" %>

Anyway, I discoverd that I have this error (see below for more info):

ActionController::RoutingError in Pages#user
No route matches {:action=>"destroy", :controller=>"users"}

The error is generated from this form statement located in a partial loaded from show.html.erb:

<%= form_for(@user, :url => user_path) do |f| %>
  ...
<% end %>

Answer 1

:locals => { :user => @current_user }

and in template

Name: <%= user.name %>

Local variables are local, so you don't need @ to refer them.

@user502052
You can render view explicitly from your controller.

render :template => "users/show", :locals => {...}

When you don't execute render in controller, framework does that for you with default parameters. When you do, you can specify different template file, pass local variables, render a partial: anything render function supports.