[Backgroundrb-devel] render rhtml templates in worker

[Jacob Robbins]

So i have not figured out any sane way to access controllers inside of 
backgroundrb or other rails-working scripts but instead i've resorted to 
rendering my rhtml templates directly using the ERB module that rails 
already includes from ruby standard lib.

There are a few limitations to using ERB in the raw:
- it doesn't understand the trailing dash in <% -%> so you have to strip 
those.
- obviously it doesn't know about any rails helper methods although i 
think you might be able to explicitly include their classes.
- you have to pass it a binding to your namespace or else it won't be 
able to access any instance variables

Here's an example that works from inside of a model class:


     #load template into ERB object for rendering
     erb = ERB.new( IO.read( rhtml_template_path ) )

     #set instance variables for rendering
     @report = self
     @chart = @report.chart

     # in order for the erb template to access the instance variables
     # we must pass it a binding to this namespace
     b = binding

     #render template with instance variables
     rendered_result = erb.result(b)


One upside to giving up all the rails framework help is that it runs a 
bit faster and lighter.

-Jacob


Jacob Robbins wrote:
> I'm trying to make a worker that will render a large page to a file, 
> very similar to what rails' builtin cacheing does except with the 
> rendering done outside of rails.
> 
> The only advice I've found is to use 
> ActionController::Integration::Session.new but this doesn't seem to 
> allow setting session variables the way the functional tests do. Is 
> there a way to call a controller's methods or render an rhtml template 
> from a background worker?
> 
> -Jacob
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