I'm new to Rails and I'm trying to learn it using Rails 3 (RC).
I have managed to use http://plist.rubyforge.org/ for supporting the output of plists. I would like to check with you guys to see if my approach is the right way to do it. Here goes:
In the gemfile I added gem 'plist'
In config/initializers/mime_types.rb I added Mime::Type.register "application/plist", :plist
In the controller, I added format.plist { render :plist => #product } in show
In the model, I added
def to_plist
attributes.to_plist
end
And finally, in the view file show.plist.erb, I have <%= raw #product.to_plist %>
Accessing for instance /products/2.plist works fine, but being new to Rails, I'm wondering if there are anything I should have done differently.
Looks right to me.
The only suggestion I have is to perhaps mix in the to_plist method into ActiveRecord::Base so that you don't have to define it over and over in each model. Perhaps this method will even support render_with syntax?
I'm about to do something similar myself.
Related
If I render html I get html to the browser which works great. However, how can I get a route's response (the html) when being called in a module or class.
I need to do this because I'm sending documents to DocRaptor and rather than store the markup/html in a db column I would like to instead store record IDs and create the markup when the job executes.
A possible solution is using Ruby's HTTP library, Httparty or wget or something and open up the route and use the response.body. Before doing so I thought I'd ask around.
Thanks!
-- Update --
Here's something like what I ended up going with:
Quick tip - in case anyone does this and need their helper methods you need to extend AV with ApplicationHelper:
Here's something like what I ended up doing:
av = ActionView::Base.new()
av.view_paths = ActionController::Base.view_paths
av.extend ApplicationHelper #or any other helpers your template may need
body = av.render(:template => "orders/receipt.html.erb",:locals => {:order => order})
Link:
http://www.rigelgroupllc.com/blog/2011/09/22/render-rails3-views-outside-of-your-controllers/
check this question out, it contains the code probably want in an answer:
Rails 3 > Rendering views in rake task
I have a sinatra app that is mostly using erb for templates, but I am adding some mustache partials for blocks of html that need to be rendered on both the server and client side. I have a "views" directory where I'm keeping all my templates, including the mustache templates I'm adding. For example, the structure looks something like this:
views/
index.html.erb
_wingding.html.erb
_widget.html.mustache
Let's say I'm rendering index.html.erb using this endpoint:
get '/' do
erb :index
end
And inside that template, I want to render both of the above partials [UPDATE: it turns out this partial method is not built into sinatra, but is included via a gem (see my answer for details), but it still relies on the main sinatra rendering component, so the problem here still stands.]. So index.html.erb contains:
<%= partial :wingding %>
<%= partial :widget %>
The erb partial (wingding) renders fine, but the mustache partial (widget) does not. It causes the application to throw an exception:
Template engine not found: mustache
I have included the 'mustache' gem in the project. I tried 'require mustache/sinatra' and register Mustache::Sinatra. Both of these statements worked, but didn't solve the problem above. Any idea how to tell sinatra about mustache so that it can render mustache partials?
I'm setting my views directory by including this configuration:
configure do
set :views, File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'views')
end
Version numbers:
sinatra 1.3.1
mustache 0.99.4
ruby 1.9.3
So it turns out the gem listed in the solution in my other answer caches output, meaning you can't use it to include the same partial with different locals in the same request, which makes it worthless for my purposes. So here's another (admittedly hackish) solution that I've settled on. I created a helper that will just deliver the contents of a given view:
helpers do
def template_contents(path)
File.open("#{settings.views}/#{path}") { |f| f.read }
end
end
Then, I just do a regular Mustache#render:
<%= Mustache.render(template_contents('_widget.html.mustache'), { ... }) %>
This works great for my use case.
I figured this out. First, I must note something I didn't realize when I posted the question. partial is not actually built into sinatra. It is being included in my app as part of the sinatra-more gem (discontinued, most of it's functionality is now in a project called padrino, but still using sinatra-more in this app). The partial method is included like this:
require 'sinatra_more/render_plugin'
module Sinatra
register SinatraMore::RenderPlugin
end
Anyway, that just adds the partial method (along with some other rendering helpers) but this method falls back on the built-in sinatra rendering code, so this fact is independent of the actual issue at hand in this question -- that sinatra does not by default recognize the mustache template engine. Turns out someone created a super simple gem to make it work, sinatra-mustache. You simply include the gem and require the library:
require 'sinatra/mustache'
That's it -- it just works! No additional configuration necessary. If you're curious how it works, the source code is pretty simple. It's by no means a one-liner to register a new template engine with sinatra (even saying "register" is a misnomer -- you basically have to implement it), but it's still fairly simple.
UPDATE: This gem caches the output for a given request/template, so you can't use it a second time with different locals. I could see cases where that's okay, but that makes it worthless for my use case.
On my rails3 application I want to use redcarpet to handle user's posts and the user comment section. As such I'd like to extend redcarpet to support turning #username into a link to a user on my site. I know redcarpet is written in C but is there anyway easy way to extend it in ruby? How hard would it be to write it in C? Should I just do this outside of redcarpet?
Also I'm intrested in some other extensions of redcarpet that would be shorthand for linking to other models in my app. I'm not sure the syntax yet but I'm guessing it would be similar to how github handles linking to issues.
I found it pretty easy to extend redcarpet's parser in Ruby for my rails 3 app. It wasn't scary at all.
First, start by deriving a class from Redcarpet's HTML renderer and override the preprocess method as recommended in the docs. In Rails 3.2 and Rails 4, this file can go anywhere and you don't need to require it. I use a 'services' folder to hold code like this.
# app/services/my_flavored_markdown.rb
class MyFlavoredMarkdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
def preprocess(text)
text
end
end
Next step is to add methods that do text substitutions you want. Here I use regex to wrap text that looks like "#mention" in an HTML span tag with a css class 'mention'.
# app/services/my_flavored_markdown.rb
class MyFlavoredMarkdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
def preprocess(text)
wrap_mentions(text)
end
def wrap_mentions(text)
text.gsub! /(^|\s)(#\w+)/ do
"#{$1}<span class='mention'>#{$2}</span>"
end
text
end
end
You could just as easily look up a user's profile page and wrap the #mention in an anchor tag instead. In my case, I also made methods for emoticons and hashtags that worked the same way and chained the methods together.
The last step is to add a helper that accepts some text, creates an instance of your Redcarpet-derived class, passes the text into that for processing, and returns the html result.
# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
def flavored_markdown_to_html(text)
renderer = MyFlavoredMarkdown.new()
# These options might be helpful but are not required
options = {
safe_links_only: true,
no_intra_emphasis: true,
autolink: true
}
Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, options).render(text)
}
In your views you can call it like this:
<%= flavored_markdown_to_html("This is something worth #mentioning") %>
The output would then be:
This is something worth <span class='mention'>#mentioning</span>.
I once tried to extend redcarpet, but found it very difficult. If there are no other dependencies on redcarpet I'd recommend you try rpeg-markdown which is a (somewhat outdated) Ruby gem providing bindings to the excellent peg-markdown.
peg-markdown is a markdown interpreter written as a formal grammar. This means that it is very easy to extend it with own syntax. I've successfully extended peg-markdown for my own projects (see my fork here) and I found it to be much simpler than fiddling with redcarpet's custom parser code.
I also found peg-markdown to have fewer bugs.
The Ruby bindings may have to be made current by updating the git submodule. (I'm planning to submit a pull request to update rpeg-markdown to the latest version of peg-markdown.)
I need to create image files on-the-fly in my controller with RMagick and send them to browser. Looks like it's very simple, but I can't find a way. I've tried just simply render them, but it fails due to data is binary. I've also tried to use send_data, but Padrino says it doesn't know about such method.
So, what have I missed? How can I solve this problem?
Researching how to send files through Padrino controller I've found this question and it helps me to reach my goal.
The send_data method is a Sinatra request-method which has been removed in the version 1.0: https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/1.0/CHANGES#L108
I'm using the Padrino version 0.10.7 and my action have became into this:
get :screenshot, :provides => :jpg do
...
File.open("path/to/file", "r").readlines
end
according to sinatra api you don't need this anymore.
get :image, with: id, provides: :png do
img = Image.find(params[:id])
img.binary_data_or_so
end
basically is the same of:
get '/send_binarydata' do
content_type 'image/png'
\x01\x02\x03
end
I really don’t need the overhead of Rails for my very small project, so I’m trying to achieve this just using just plain Ruby and HAML.
I want to include another HAML file inside my HAML template. But I haven’t found a good—or really usable—way of doing this.
For example, I have these two HAML files:
documents.haml
%html
%body
= include(menu.haml) body
%article …
menu.haml
%ul
%li
%a whatever …
Include is obviously not the way to go here. But it does a nice job describing what I’m trying to achieve in this example.
I totally recommend the Tilt gem for these things. It provides a standard interface for rendering many different template langages with the same API, lets you set custom scope and locals, lets you use yield, and is robust and fast. Sinatra is using it for templates.
Example:
require 'haml'
require 'tilt'
template = Tilt.new('path/to/file.haml')
# => #<Tilt::HAMLTemplate #file="path/to/file.haml" ...>
layout = Tilt.new('path/to/layout.haml')
output = layout.render { template.render }
This lets you yield inside the layout to get the rendered template, just like Rails. As for partials, David already described a simple and nice way to go.
But actually, if what you're writing is going to be served over HTTP, i suggest you take a look at Sinatra, which already provides templating, and has the simplest request routing you could imagine.
I've done this before, just for a quick-and-dirty template producer. The easiest way is to just render the HAML inside the parent object:
%p some haml that's interesting
= Haml::Engine.new('%p this is a test').render
%p some more template
You'll more than likely want to build some methods to make this easier--a couple of helper methods. Maybe you write one called render_file that takes a filename as an argument. That method might look something like:
def render_file(filename)
contents = File.read(filename)
Haml::Engine.new(contents).render
end
Then, your template would look more like:
%p some template
= render_file('some_filename.haml')
%p more template
Note, you will probably need to pass self to the original Haml::Engine render so that it knows how to find your render_file method.
I've had great success just using the instructions posted by David Richards in a concatenated way, without variables, like this:
= Haml::Engine.new(File.read('/Volumes/Project/file_to_include.haml')).render
There's obviously a more elegant way. But for someone who just wants to include one or two files, this should work nicely. It's a drawback that all base files using these includes have to be recompiled after some changes to the latter. It might be worthwile to just use php include if the environment allows that.
def render_file(filename)
contents = File.read('views/'+filename)
Haml::Engine.new(contents).render
end
(Adding this semi-redundant answer to show how one might incorporate the techniques from other answers.)
Include something like this in your setup code to monkey-patch the Haml library.
module Haml::Helpers
def render_haml(filename)
contents = File.read(Rails.root.join("app", "assets", "templates", filename))
Haml::Engine.new(contents).render
end
end
Then in your Haml file
.foo
= render_haml('partial.haml')
.bar
Obviously this is a Rails-ish example (because I wanted to use HAML in my asset pipeline instead of as views)... You will want to replace Rails.root.join(...) with a way to find filename in your project's templates or partials directory.