Here's a fun and easy little trick. Let's throw a debug(params) into our view, and then we can see what our params are for every page! In Rails, this means seeing the controller/action for every page you visit as well as any dynamic content that was used for each view --- nifty!
1. Add the debug
First, let's head into our application.html.erb page and add it into our layout, in this case right under the footer:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title><%= full_title(yield(:title)) %></title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<%= render 'layouts/rails_default' %>
<%= render 'layouts/shim' %>
</head>
<body>
<%= render 'layouts/header' %>
<div class="container">
<%= yield %>
<%= render 'layouts/footer' %>
<%= debug(params) if Rails.env.development? %>
</div>
</body>
</html>
(While not absolutely necessary, our post-fix conditional if Rails.env.development? makes sure that if we were to accidentally push this guy into production we wouldn't see it!)
2. Add some style
The debug will be styled using .debug_dump class selector. We can use a mixin from Sass called box_sizing to make this extra pretty. Head into your app/assets/stylesheets/custom.css file and drop this in:
@import "bootstrap-sprockets";
@import "bootstrap";
$gray-medium-light: #eaeaea;
@mixin box_sizing {
-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
.debug_dump {
clear: both;
float: left;
width: 100%;
margin-top: 45px;
@include box_sizing;
}
3. Results
Great! Now load up your rails server and check out your pages. You should see a beautiful little grey box with useful info about the page that is rendered; specifically, you'll see your page params in a pretty little YAML format!
Thanks go to Michael Hartl's excellent Learn Enough series for this tip!
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