Planet CakePHP

Thanks to the built-in AtomFeedHelper it is quite easy to generate an atom feed with Rails.
Here an example from the API:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
atom_feed do |feed|
feed.title("My great blog!")
feed.updated(@posts.first.created_at)

@posts.each do |post|
feed.entry(post) do |entry|
entry.title(post.title)
entry.content(post.body, :type => 'html')

entry.author do |author|
author.name("DHH")
end
end
end
end

The code should be self-explanatory (if not, please leave a comment).
Recently, I had two such views which were almost identical, the only difference was the feed title. And that’s of course not really DRY.
One possible approach to fix this “issue” is to set an instance variable with the feed title in the controller and render the same view in both cases. As I don’t like to set view titles (resp. feed titles in this case) in the controller, I decided to use a partial.
And so I put the code from above into a partial (plus changing the instance variable “@posts” to a local variable “posts” and introducing a new local variable “feed_title”), and tried to use this partial (app/views/shared/_feed.atom.builder) in the following way:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
render :partial => 'shared/feed', :locals => {:feed_title => "My Posts", :posts => @posts}

Well, it didn’t work. No output was generated.
After experimenting a bit I found the following solution by moving the outer-most block definition from the partial to the views:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
atom_feed do |feed|
render :partial => 'shared/feed', :locals => {:feed => feed, :feed_title => "My Posts", :posts => @posts}
end

I don’t know whether this is the best solution (probably not), but it is definitely better than what I had previously ;-)