Rails - Mar 2005 - Using ActionView or ERb outside of the web application

Hello,

I have an application that is using Rails for the web application and
ActiveRecord on backend processing servers. (The backend machines just
include environment.rb to set up the environment).

My question is, on the backend machines, what''s the best way to run an
action locally and save the response to a file? The action is really
simple: just a @patch = Patch.find(id) to load the object, so maybe it
would be easier to just use ERB directly?

If ERB is the easiest way, should I just expose a method on the model
that returns the ERB results? That might be more usable: puts
Patch.find(id).ini.

(The view for the action generates an INI type output, not HTML)

Thanks for any pointers!

-Steve