yeasayer
yeasayer

Reputation: 868

How to render file in Rails 5 API?

I have a single-page application written in React with Ruby on Rails back-end (API mode). Rails is also serving static files. I'm pointing Rails router to public/index.html, so my SPA could manage his own routing with react-router. This is common practice in order to make direct links and refresh to work.

routes.rb

match '*all', to: 'application#index', via: [:get]

application_controller.rb

class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
  def index
    render file: 'public/index.html'
  end
end

The problem is this doesn't work in API mode. It's just an empty response. If I change the parent class to ActionController::Base everything works as expected. But I don't want to inherit the bloat of full class, I need slim API version.

I've tried adding modules like ActionController::Renderers::All and AbstractController::Rendering without success.

Upvotes: 13

Views: 12985

Answers (4)

Zan Zas
Zan Zas

Reputation: 591

I usually just redirect_to 'file path'.

def export
    # When the route coming to get 'some_report/export', to: 'greate_controller#export'
    # The file where you write or preparing, then you can redirect some path like : http://localhost:3000/public/tmpfile/report20210507.xlsx
    # And it will just redirect the file for you
    file_path = "public/tmpfile/report20210507.xlsx"
    redirect_to "#{root_url}#{file_path}"
end

For this example

root_url = "http://localhost:3000/"

Upvotes: 0

common-nighthawk
common-nighthawk

Reputation: 667

This should work, and allow you to keep inheriting from ActionController::API--

class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
  def index
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render body: Rails.root.join('public/index.html').read }
    end
  end
end

The render logic changed for ActionController::API with Rails 5.

Upvotes: -1

Sergio Tulentsev
Sergio Tulentsev

Reputation: 230336

If I change the parent class to ActionController::Base everything works as expected. But I don't want to inherit the bloat of full class, I need slim API version.

Yes, if you serve index from ApplicationController, changing its base class would affect all other controllers. This is not good. But what if you had a specialized controller to serve this page?

class StaticPagesController < ActionController::Base
  def index
    render file: 'public/index.html'
  end
end

This way, you have only one "bloated" controller and the others remain slim and fast.

Upvotes: 29

Kris
Kris

Reputation: 19948

You could do

render text: File.read(Rails.root.join('public', 'index.html')), layout: false

Upvotes: 1

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