Breaking Rails, hackery that you probably shouldn't do - rendering views in model

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You may have some reason to break outside MVC model and I won’t give you lecture why you shoudn’t really do it, neither I won’t describe how you will burn in hell for commiting that kind of sin. Instead I will provide a working solution how it can be done. Just as a example of bad pratice :P.

So – how to render view inside model in Rails 3.2?

Let’s start by creating an class that will inherit from AbstractController::Base. You will also need to include bunch of other classes that are required for rendering views, include url_helper, application helper and any other helpers that you may want to use, don’t forget to setup your views path.

# lib/render_abstract.rb
class RenderAbstract < AbstractController::Base
  include AbstractController::Rendering
  include AbstractController::Layouts
  include AbstractController::Helpers
  include AbstractController::Translation
  include AbstractController::AssetPaths
  include ActionDispatch::Routing
  include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
  helper ApplicationHelper
  self.view_paths = "app/views"

  def show(article)
    @article = article
    render :partial => 'articles/show', :layout=>false
  end
end

show method will accept object of class Article and setup variable accessible to view in standard fashion. Here’s how Article model looks:

# app/models/article.rb
require 'render_abstract.rb'
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base

  def render
    RenderAbstract.new.show(self)
  end

end

Calling render on article object should now render your view. How about that. Just don’t tell anyone ;-).

In next part I will give you some ideas how can you proxy your Rails application inside existing PHP project. The hunt for witches begins now.

ruby on rails views model on random thoughts

Breaking Rails, hackery that you probably shouldn't do - rendering views in model