turbo-frames

A common UI is a list on the left and a details panel (drawer) on the right. With Turbo Frames, each list item link can target a details frame. Clicking an item swaps the drawer content while leaving the list intact. The server still renders HTML, so

Inline editing works best when the frame boundary is small and stable (one row). Render the display state inside a frame, then link to edit inside the same frame. Submit swaps it back. This keeps controllers simple and UI snappy.

Turbo Frames can trigger lots of small requests, so caching matters. For expensive frame endpoints (like an activity panel), I use stale? with an ETag that includes a cache key and the latest update timestamp. If the content hasn’t changed, Rails retu

Tabs often turn into a mini-SPA. Instead, I treat each tab as a URL and load its content into a turbo_frame_tag named tab_content. Clicking a tab link targets that frame. This gives you browser history, deep linking, and sharable URLs, while keeping t

A command palette feels like a SPA feature, but you can do it Hotwire-first: place a turbo_frame_tag 'modal' in the layout and load the palette HTML into it. A small Stimulus controller listens for meta+k and navigates the modal frame to /palette. The

For slow endpoints, I like a skeleton placeholder rather than a blank area. Turbo Frames make this easy: render a “loading skeleton” inside the frame tag as the initial content, then set src so Turbo fetches the real content. When the response arrives

Wizards are often over-engineered with client state machines. With Turbo Frames, I render each step inside a frame, and the “Next” button simply POSTs to update the record and then redirects to the next step URL. If validation fails, I re-render the s

You can build rich UIs by scoping navigation to a frame (e.g., a sidebar). Links inside the sidebar update only that frame while the main content stays put. This is great for filters and settings panels.

Sorting is a great candidate for Turbo Frames: clicking “Newest” shouldn’t reload your whole page shell. I wrap the list in a frame (e.g., id='results') and make sort links target that frame. The controller reads params[:sort] and applies an order sco

When a form submits inside a Turbo Frame, a normal redirect can sometimes feel odd (especially if the redirect response doesn’t include the matching frame). A clean approach is to set the Turbo-Location header for Turbo requests. Turbo interprets it a