Rails Support Extension

Extending Radiant via the standard Rails action pack is a bit painful right now cause it's not easy to re-use the Radiant Layouts.

This Radiant Extension allows you to create Radiant Extensions that can use the normal Rail action pack to create rich database driven application but which are still tightly integrated via the Radiant layout system.

Quick Usage

Once this extension is installed, update your controllers so that they extended SiteController. This extension adds a radiant_render method to the SiteController which is identical to the standard Rails render method except that it uses Radiant to layout the view.

For example, app/controllers/sample_controller.rb:

class SampleController < SiteController
  def index    
    radiant_render :layout=>"path/to/page"
  end    
end

The above will look up the Radiant page that maps to URL "path/to/page" and use that as the template for rendering the content of the rendered rhtml view. Instead of using the page's body part, the result of rendering the rhtml view will be used as the body.

If layout is not specified, it uses the layout of the root page.

This extension also adds a helper to include snippets from Radiant

For example, app/views/sample_controller/index.rhtml:

<h1>How to include a snippet:</h1>
<%= snippet("welcome")%>

Detailed Example

For those folks having problems getting started with this extension, I recommend you download and install the following extension which show you how to use the rails_support: http://radiant-rails-support.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/extensions/rails_support_example

These are the steps that were taken to build that example:

1. First generate the extension and example controler

C:\radiant>ruby script\generate extension rails_support_example
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/app/controllers
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/app/helpers
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/app/models
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/app/views
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/db/migrate
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/lib/tasks
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/test/fixtures
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/test/functional
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/test/unit
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/README
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/Rakefile
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/rails_support_example_extension.rb
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/lib/tasks/rails_support_example_extension_tasks.rake
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/test/test_helper.rb
      create  vendor/extensions/rails_support_example/test/functional/rails_support_example_extension_test.rb

C:\radiant>ruby script\generate extension_controler rails_support_example example
      exists  app/controllers/
      exists  app/helpers/
      create  app/views/example
      exists  test/functional/
      create  app/controllers/example_controller.rb
      create  test/functional/example_controller_test.rb
      create  app/helpers/example_helper.rb

C:\radiant>

2. Add a route in the rails_support_example.rb to your example controller:

  define_routes do |map|
     map.connect 'example/:action/:id', :controller => 'example'
  end

3. Update your controller so that it extends SiteController

4. Add the index action to the example controller

  def index
    radiant_render 
  end

5. Add a the app\views\example\index.rhtml view file:

<p>
  Hi this file is "<%= h __FILE__ %>"
</p>
<p>
  Please define a snippet called "welcome", and it will be rendered after this:
</p>
<p>   
<%= snippet("welcome") %>
</p>

6. Start up radiant and browse the http://localhost:3000/example