Element views not rendering from Solidus

[gabrielrios]

Steps to reproduce

If you try to render a Element from inside a solidus page

  <%= render_elements from_page: 'header' %>

The element won't render, only showing <!-- Missing view for element -->.
It tries to render app/views/spree/alchemy/elements/element_view instead of app/views/alchemy/elements/element_view

This worked fine on Alchemy 4.1, I'm guessing this is related to render_elements changes on #1553 and #1554

System configuration

• Alchemy Version: 4.3.0
• Rails Version: 5.2.3

[tvdeyen]

Very interesting. Thanks for reporting. This seems to be a namespacing issue. What controller scope are you running this views code in?

[gabrielrios]

Spree. This code is on my "spree/layouts/spree_application.html.erb". The controller is Spree::ProductsController

[DennisNissen]

Rails will by default prepend the controller namespace to the partials path. If you render your Elements inside a view rendered by a namespaced controller rails uses the to_partial_path method of the Alchemy::Element-Model and the namespace of the controller to resolve the partial path.

The only way to get around this maybe to MonkeyPatch Alchemy::ElementsHelper to disable controller namespace prepending.

module Alchemy::ElementsHelper
  def disable_controller_naymspace_in_partial_path
    ActionView::Base.prefix_partial_path_with_controller_namespace = false
  end

  def enable_controller_naymspace_in_partial_path
    ActionView::Base.prefix_partial_path_with_controller_namespace = true
  end

  alias_method :old_render_element, :render_element

  def render_element(*args)
    disable_controller_naymspace_in_partial_path
    content = old_render_element(*args)
    enable_controller_naymspace_in_partial_path
    content
  end
end

@tvdeyen this breaks every usage of element views in plugin engines (if they use isolate_namespace) - i don't know the exact implications of disabling the prefix_partial_path_with_controller_namespace to other parts of alchemy, but maybe you can consider disabling it in Alchemy::ElementsHelper.render_element when rendering the element views.

[tvdeyen]

@DennisNissen thanks for the detailed report. Maybe it helps to prefix the path from to_partial_path with a leading slash? Hopefully this tells Rails to use an "absolute" and not "relative" path. I really would like to not have to do the proposal. Rather I would like to discuss with Rails core team to make this optional on a per render basis. This can't just only be us who have issues with this debatable "feature".

Can you please try to override to_partial_path in app/models/alchemy/element.rb and report if this fixes your issues? @gabrielrios

[DennisNissen]

I think that was the first thing i tried, but it did not work.

I would be sufficient if to_partial_path could be set to "absolut" or "relative" - but i think that might not be the best place to enable/disable a controller to prepend his namespace. I'm curious what the rails core team come up with concerning this issue :).

[tvdeyen]

Reading this over and over again and I think this is odd behavior from Rails.

Alchemy itself is an isolated and name spaced engine. Since we explicitly add the alchemy namespace in the elements to_partial_path and we render_elements in the Alchemy controller namespace, we should actually get app/views/alchemy/alchemy/elements as element partial path, but we do not.

Either Rails is magically removing duplicated namespaces or we miss something here.

I think we should disable ActionView::Base.prefix_partial_path_with_controller_namespace in the alchemy-solidus gem in the alchemy_in_solidus module, as Alchemy does not need this setting to work (we set the namespace in Alchemy::Element#to_partial_path and Solidus does not either. All partial paths are explicitely setting spree as well.

This action view feature is very confusing.

[tvdeyen]

@gabrielrios @DennisNissen created AlchemyCMS/alchemy-solidus#53

Could you try this in your apps and report if this fixes your issue and does not introduce new ones?

[jrieger]

@tvdeyen I can confirm this works.