Projects/Ferb

Ferb: Functions+ERb

Ferb: Functions+ERb

I like Rails a lot, but like most programmers I have my particular tastes so parts of Rails (and Merb, for that matter) just don’t sit right with me, one of those parts is rendering and partials.

Rendering partials is particularly ugly just look:

render :partial => "account", :locals => { :account => @buyer }

Why not a simple function call like:

render_account(@buyer)

or, if you would like a hash:

render_account(:account => @buyer)

To make things nice we have ferb. Just install in the usual way:

$ gem install ferb

and you’re off.

Here’s an example of use:

require 'ferb'
class Foo
  include Ferb
  def_template :woo, :file => 'sample1.erb'  
end

Where sample1.erb looks like:

<!-- |a,b = {}, *c, &d| -->
<html>
  <body>
    a:<%= a.inspect %><br/>
    b:<%= b.inspect %><br/>
    c:<%= c.inspect %><br/>
    d:<%= d.inspect %><br/>
  </body>
</html>

The first line comment embeds the argument signature, all standard argument types are supported. You can now call the function woo normally and the template file will be used (don’t worry everything is compiled once).

g = Foo.new
g.woo('A',{:b => 2},1,2) { "ggg" }

<html>
  <body>
    a:"A"<br/>
    b:{:b=>2}<br/>
    c:[1, 2]<br/>
    d:#<Proc:0xb7c07b34@(irb):13><br/>
  </body>
</html>

There is a helper module for use with Rails, simply add

require('ferb_helper')

in your config/environment.rb file, and

require 'ferb'
Ferb.enable_reload=true

in your config/environments/development.rb file (this setting makes ferb reload template files if updated during development).

Finally, in any helper file you can simply include

module MyHelper
  include FerbHelper
end

and get the def_template goodness. To make ferb magic available in controllers add this to your application controller:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def self.inherited(subclass)
    super(subclass)
    subclass.send :include, FerbHelper
  end
end

Now you can banish rendering contortions and partial madness.

Enjoy.

<corruptmemory>

Projects/Ferb

Ferb: Functions+ERb