How do I connect routes to partials?

Question

I am working on a rails app, where one of the tabs (the user show view) has a partial that is an inner navbar of sorts. There are three links ( match , activity , message ), each of which correspond to a different partial that is rendered to the right of the inner navbar.

Each of the partials has a corresponding route in my routes.rb file, but they are all rendered within one controller action ( user#show ). As a result, my inner navbar links alone are bringing the page to the proper route, but aren't successfully rendering the partials. To resolve this, I am checking within the view for what the end of the route is, and rendering the appropriate partial accordingly.

I imagine that there is a more ideal way to accomplish what I am looking to do, but I've had trouble figuring out what that might be.

I know that I could use separate view files instead of partials to resolve this, but for the sake of modularity, I would rather not move in that direction. Is there a better way for me to link routes to the appropriate partials?

routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount RailsAdmin::Engine => '/admin', as: 'rails_admin'
  resources :messages
  resources :replies
  resources :posts
  resources :organizations
  resources :users
  resources :sessions
  resources :matches

  root "welcome#index"
  get "/users/:id/match", to: "users#show", as: "user_match"
  get "/users/:id/activity", to: "users#show", as: "user_activity"
  get "/users/:id/message", to: "users#show", as: "user_message"
  
end

users_controller

class UsersController < ApplicationController
    skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, only: [:create]

    def show
        @user = User.find(params[:id])
    end
    
    def new
        @user = User.new
    end
    
    def create
        @user = User.new(user_params)
        if @user.save
            log_in @user
            flash[:notice] = "Your account was created!"
            redirect_to @user
        else
            flash[:alert] = @user.errors.full_messages.join(", ")
            render 'new'
        end
    end
    
    private

    def user_params
        params.require(:user).permit(:first_name, :last_name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation)
    end 

end

/users/show.html.erb

<div class="row">
  <% if @user.id == current_user.id %>
    <div class="col-md-2 justify-content-start">
      <div>
        <ul>
          <li>
            <%= link_to(user_message_path(current_user.id)) do %>
              <%= fa_icon "envelope", text: "Messages" %>
            <% end %>
          </li>
          <li>
            <%= link_to(user_activity_path(current_user.id)) do %>
              <%= fa_icon "comments", text: "Activity" %>
            <% end %>
          </li>
          <li>
            <%= link_to(user_match_path(current_user.id)) do %>
              <%= fa_icon "handshake-o", text: "Matches" %>
            <% end %>
          </li>
          </ul>
      </div>
    </div>
  <% end %>
  <div class="col-md-10 justify-content-center">
    <% last = request.path.split('/').last%>
    <% if @user.id == current_user.id %>
      <% if last == "match" %>
        <%= render partial: "match" %>
      <% elsif last == "activity" %>
        <%= render partial: "activity" %>
      <% elsif last == "message" %>
        <%= render partial: "message" %>
      <% else %>
        <%= render partial: "home"%>
      <% end %>
    <% else %>
      <%= render partial: "home" %>
    <% end %>
  </div>
</div>

Answer 1

You have a few alternative approaches you could take, like setting each sub-page up as a new controller (UserMatchesController, etc.) and routing to them directly, or using AJAX to load the sub-sections dynamically, but your approach isn't bad. What I would do to improve on it is to make the sub-page a named segment in the route with a constraint to lock it down:

get "/users/:id/:section", to: "users#show", constraints: { section: /^(message|home|match|activity)$/ }

You can link to each section by passing that parameter as an argument:

link_to user_path(current_user.id, section: "message")

And then in your template, something like:

render partial: params[:section]