Re: Rendering of Remote Partials

doug
Sat, 12 May 2007 16:12:25 -0000

Upon reflection, I decided this whole thing seems to be way too
complicated
for what I''m trying to accomplish.  I decided to revisit
Jason''s
suggestion of
using wget.  The only problem with it is it''s a bit clumsy and lacks a
bit in
the elegance department.  Then I reasoned that implementing a wget
method
in ruby probably isn''t all that difficult.  Upon further reflection I
guessed that
someone had probably already done it.  So, I turned to Google to see
what
I could find.  It turns out that this is incredibly easy to
implement.  So here''s
the source for my helper method:

def remote_include_partial(url)
  require ''open-uri''
  out=""
  open(url){ |f| out=out+f.read }
end

I am a neophyte in Ruby programming.  So, if anyone has any
suggestions
for improvement, I''d love to hear them.

Including a require within a method seems a bit strange to me; but, I
don''t
know how else to do it within the context of a helper.

I''m thinking about expanding the code so that it will work with both
remote
and local partials.  The code would test to see if the url begins with
''http:''.
If it does, it''s remote else it''s local.  If I do that,
I''m wondering
if there might
be a better name for the argument now named ''url''.

Sometimes, it''s inconvenient dealing with partials.  It might be nice
to have
them as complete html documents.  So, my second contemplated
improvement
would be to optionally allow for removing any beginning content down
to and
including any opening and also removing any closing
and
anything that follows.

Comments on any of the above are most welcome.

Thanks for the input.