RailsTemplatable

A lightweight Rails Engine that enables any ActiveRecord model to use predefined templates for content management. Built with a simple one-to-many relationship, allowing each model instance to have one template while templates can be reused across multiple instances.

Features

🎯 Simple 1:N Relationship - Each record has one template, templates can be reused
📝 Multiple Content Formats - Support for HTML, Markdown, and plain text
🏷️ Flexible Categories - Pre-defined categories (feature_request, bug_report, etc.) or custom
🔗 Direct Foreign Key - No join table needed, cleaner database schema
🚀 Easy Integration - Simple concern-based inclusion

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "rails_templatable"

And then execute:

$ bundle install
$ bin/rails railties:install:migrations FROM=rails_templatable
$ bin/rails db:migrate

For each model that will use templates, add a foreign key:

add_reference :posts, :template,
              foreign_key: { to_table: :rails_templatable_templates },
              index: false

Quick Start

1. Enable templates in your models

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  include RailsTemplatable::HasTemplate
end

class WorkLog < ApplicationRecord
  include RailsTemplatable::HasTemplate
end

2. Create templates

# Feature request template
feature_template = RailsTemplatable::Template.create!(
  category: "feature_request",
  content: "# Feature Request\n\n## Description\n\n## Acceptance Criteria",
  content_format: :markdown
)

# Bug report template
bug_template = RailsTemplatable::Template.create!(
  category: "bug_report",
  content: "## Bug Description\n\n## Steps to Reproduce\n\n## Expected Behavior",
  content_format: :markdown
)

3. Assign templates to records

post = Post.create!(
  title: "Add user authentication",
  content: "Implement OAuth2 login",
  template: feature_template
)

# View template
post.template.category  # => "feature_request"
post.template.content   # => "# Feature Request..."

Template Categories

Common template categories included:

Category	Description
`feature_request`	Feature requests
`bug_report`	Bug reports
`tech_improvement`	Technical improvements
`meeting_note`	Meeting notes
`api_design`	API designs

You can create any custom category as needed.

Relationship Model

One-to-Many (1:N)

One Post/WorkLog instance → One Template
One Template → Many instances

Example:

Post 1 → Template A (feature_request)
Post 2 → Template B (bug_report)
Post 3 → Template A (feature_request)  # Reusable

Content Formats

Three content formats are supported:

html (0) - HTML content
markdown (1) - Markdown content
txt (2) - Plain text content (default)

RailsTemplatable::Template.create!(
  category: "notification",
  content: "Simple text notification",
  content_format: :txt
)

Query Examples

# Get a record's template
post.template

# Query by category
Post.joins(:template).where(rails_templatable_templates: { category: 'feature_request' })

# Get all records using a specific template
Post.where(template: feature_template)

# Query by content format
Post.joins(:template).where(rails_templatable_templates: { content_format: 1 })

Database Schema