Comments on: Today’s Dispatch: Weaning ActionView off of content negotiation

By: Jase

Jase — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:03:21 +0000

Just out of interest, is there any plans to make a public API for this at some point.

I ended up stumbling here, because I have a few pages on a project that need rendering with alternative markup, so I’ve registered a MIME alias in config/initializers/mime_types.rb for HTML (bit like the iphone example they give).

What would be handy is the ability to fall back on rendering HTML mime templates when templates for my specific mime alias can not be found.

For now I’m getting round this by omitting the MIME type from the template extension, but this is “catch all”, feels a bit dirty given it the catch all is global for all MIME types (and thus should be an issue).

(I probably one day will have a peek at the internals for this probably come up with a little short term hack until such API does arise… And on a unreleated note, excellent work here and all the other places with cleaning up Rails 3.x, I have to say I find the source far more palatable these days :D)

By: wycats

wycats — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:34:44 +0000

The reason for the formats array is to support multiple, prioritized formats. So you can ask for :html, :xml, :all, and the first one of those will be used. There’s no actual public API for this (yet?) — it’s triggered by Accept header handling when multiple mimes are provided.

I’m interested in hearing what you had in mind.

By: Liam Morley

Liam Morley — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:30:45 +0000

Perhaps OT: This kind of reminds me of a hack I’ve been using in Rails 2 that I know won’t be supported in Rails 3. Whenever I’ve wanted to reuse a template across multiple formats, say for example so it can be displayed for both regular html format as well as for mobile phones, I’ve just named the template to *.rhtml, and voila, instant template reuse. I’m sure everybody can agree that this is a terrible idea, and it’s common knowledge that this will be deprecated in 3.0 (but if I’m still working on this app in 5 months, somebody needs to shoot me).

I noticed in your commits that you’ve modified format to be a formats array, which got me to thinking about supporting multiple formats with the same template. Will this be workable in Rails 3 (not as in my hackish example above, but with a cleaner, supported approach)?

And once again, thanks for giving some commentary on the commits, it’s great to know where Rails 3 is going.