I may not always feel like coding, but most of the time if I sit down to code I get warmed up and quickly forget I didn't feel like coding. Today was one of those days. I didn't feel like coding, but I took a look at my to-do list and figured "Hey, I can at least knock out some of this easy CSS stuff, right?" I try to live by a code of "Rails every day".
With that said, here's a little problem I've got.
Here's how I currently have a Back link written in my Menu partial:
<%= link_to 'Back', characters_path %>
The problem is, I render this partial on every page, and so the Back link shouldn't always point to characters_path. I thought an easy solution to this would be to write the code like so:
<%= link_to 'Back', :back %>
This returns the user to the last page viewed, which is closer to what I want, but then I run into some irritating navigational issues. Say you were looking at a Character's Items, and created a new Item, then hit the Back button once it was created. Since I'm rendering the form in the Items view page, it simply takes the user back to the previous view, showing a form with blank fields. So here's my question:
Is there an easier way to handle this? A better method than :back? Should I simply make two versions of the menu partial, each with a separate back link? I don't think I'll need more than two. The menu partial rendered when viewing a Character will want to point back to characters_path, whereas every other page (Items, Skills, and so forth) will need to point back to the Character view page. Maybe I'm overthinking this, considering it's just an extra partial, but I'm thinking there might be a better way to handle this. Imagine if I wanted five different menu partials, or twenty? I think it's better to think of more abstract solutions that can be applied to multiple scenarios.
