With Rails, where should I put html snippets? I don't want partials but I want them reloaded during development

Question

Being lazy (and liking DRY code), I'm the kind of guy who's going to write a few little wrappers for recurring HTML markup. Those provided by Rails are good already, but sometimes I have something a little more specific that I know I'm going to repeat over and over.

In some situations a partial can be the solution, but sometimes I'm just going to call the snippet way too often to justify the overhead of using partials.

Right now I create a helpers/html_helper.rb file and stick them in there. The problem is that helpers are not reloaded dynamically per request during development. So each time I tweak my snippet or the code around it, I have to kill the server and restart it.

Granted, it's just a 5 seconds process, but I love Rails' convenience of just developing and then refreshing the browser. So I'd love to have that for my markup snippets as well.

Note: Just sticking 'unloadable' inside the helper module doesn't work.

Answer 1

Good question! This is a technique I should abuse more frequently.

    #I go in environment.db (presumably it will work in one of the per-environment files, too.)
    Dependencies.explicitly_unloadable_constants << 'NameOfHelperToReloadHere'

That array starts out empty, incidentally, at least in my install. (Checked via console.)

I tested this locally and it works for me, at least on Rails 2.0.2. Major credit for the solution belongs to this gentleman.