# Quick Tip: Form Partials

> A cleaner way to render shared form partials in Rails 2.1

- Author: Curtis Miller
- Published: 2008-09-02
- Categories: rails, how-to
- Canonical URL: https://millarian.com/posts/quick-tip-form-partials/

Partials are a great way to keep your view code separated logically. Prior to Rails 2.1 if you wanted to reuse a form partial in, for example, a new and edit view, then you needed to pass the form into the partial somehow.

Given the following form partial:

## views/users/\_form.html.erb

```
<div>
  <%= form.label :name -%>
  <%= form.text_field :name -%>
</div>
```

## Pre-Rails 2.1

You might consider passing the form in as a local, like so.

## views/users/new.html.erb or views/users/edit.html.erb

```
<% form_for @user do |form| -%>
  <%= render :partial => 'form', :locals => { :form => form } -%>
<% end -%>
```

## Rails 2.1

There's now a shortcut for this common method of rendering a form partial.

## views/users/new.html.erb or views/users/edit.html.erb

```
<% form_for @user do |form| -%>
  <%= render :partial => form -%>
<% end -%>
```

Nice! Cleans things up a bit.