CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails-3
s.m.
s.m.

Reputation: 8043

Render view from code in /lib

Let's pretend we have a Rails project with a class named Foo residing in the lib directory.

We want to generate some HTML based on its attributes.

Now, creating a big string by concatenating HTML fragments appropriately doesn't feel right in the least bit.

My question is: is there a blessed way to do it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 526

Answers (1)

Kyle
Kyle

Reputation: 1278

You have a couple pretty straightforward options. If you're using ERB, you can do something like:

ERB.new(File.read(the_file_path)).result

I'm using a library called Tilt (https://github.com/rtomayko/tilt) in one of my applications to render a HAML template. Here's the exact sausage factory code that I'm running right now:

template = Tilt.new(ITEM_TEMPLATE) # ITEM_TEMPLATE is the path of a .haml file
template.render nil, {:item => item, :item_details => item_details}
# item and item_details are now available as local variables in the partial

If you don't want to go the templating route, you could try something like Erector (http://erector.rubyforge.org/userguide.html) as well.

Worst case scenario: instead of concatenating fragments, you could use the HEREDOC to format it nicely:

<<-HTML
  <div id="foo">
    <span class="bar">#{thing.method}</span>
    <div>#{thing.attribute}</div>
  </div>
HTML

Upvotes: 3

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