Rendering

View Paths

Every cell class can have multiple view paths. However, I advise you not to have more than two, better one, unless you’re implementing a cell in an engine. This is simply to prevent unexpected behavior.

View paths are set via the ::view_paths method.

class Cell::ViewModel
  self.view_paths = ["app/cells"]

Use the setter to override the view paths entirely, or append as follows.

class Shopify::CartCell
  self.view_paths << "/var/shopify/app/cells"

The view_paths variable is an inheritable array.

A trick to quickly find out about the directory lookup list is to inspect the ::prefixes class method of your particular cell.

puts Shopify::CartCell.prefixes
#=> ["app/cells/shopify/cart", "/var/shopify/app/cells/shopify/cart"]

This is the authorative list when finding templates. It will include inherited cell’s directories as well when you used inheritance. The list is traversed from left to right.

Partials

Even considered a taboo, you may render global partials from Cells.

SongCell < Cell::ViewModel
  include Partial

  def show
    render partial: "../views/shared/sidebar.html"
  end

Make sure to use the :partial option and specify a path relative to the cell’s view path. Cells will automatically add the format and the terrible underscore, resulting in "../views/shared/_sidebar.html.erb".