{"id":57,"date":"2009-04-02T23:55:31","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T22:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.schuerig.de\/michael\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2021-11-24T09:20:32","modified_gmt":"2021-11-24T08:20:32","slug":"ruby-views","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schuerig.de\/michael\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/04\/02\/ruby-views\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruby as a language for Rails views"},"content":{"rendered":"

Didn’t you always want to write your Rails views as plain Ruby objects? — “What?”<\/em>, I hear you say. No, I haven’t lost my mind and the idea is quite sensible (or so I hope), once you add the restriction that it is JSON-formatted data that you want to return.<\/p>\n

Say you need to set up some hashes or arrays for rendering to JSON. This is best done in Ruby and it is clearly a view concern. So let’s do it in the views. Like this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\r\n  # app\/controllers\/movies_controller.rb\r\n  def index\r\n    respond_to do |format|\r\n      format.json do\r\n        @movies = Movie.all\r\n        @count = Movie.count\r\n        render :template => 'movies\/index.json.rb'\r\n      end\r\n    end\r\n  end\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/code><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\r\n  # app\/views\/movies\/index.json.rb\r\n  {\r\n    :identifier => Movie.primary_key,\r\n    :totalCount => @count,\r\n    # render @movies does not work as it insists on returning a string\r\n    :items => @movies.map { |m| render(m) }\r\n  }\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/code><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\r\n  # app\/views\/movies\/_movie.json.rb\r\n  {\r\n    :id => movie.to_param,\r\n    :title => movie.title,\r\n    :releaseDate => movie.release_date\r\n  }\r\n<\/pre>\n
<\/code><\/p>\n
Getting it<\/h2>\n