Panoramic

An ActionView::Resolver implementation to store rails views (layouts, templates and partials) on database. Simply put: what you can do with views on filesystem, can be done on database.

NOTE: at the moment, only ActiveRecord is supported, I've planned to add more ORMs (see Todo). If you can't wait, adding other ORMs should be very trivial.

Add the following line to Gemfile:

gem "panoramic"

Your model should have the following fields:

• body (text): the source of template
• path (string): where to find template (ex: layouts/application, you_controller/action, etc...)
• locale (string): it depends from available locales in your app
• handler (string): as locale field, it depends from avaiable handlers (erb, haml, etc...)
• partial (boolean): determines if it's a partial or not (false by default)
• format (string): A valid mimetype from Mime::SET.symbols

they're what the rails' Resolver API needs to lookup templates.

A simple macro in model will activate your new Resolver. You can use a dedicated model to manage all the views in your app, or just for specific needs (ex: you want a custom template for some static pages, the other views will be fetched from filesystem).

class TemplateStorage < ActiveRecord::Base
  store_templates
end

To add Panoramic::Resolver in controller, depending on your needs, you may choose:

• prepend_view_path: search for templates first in your resolver, then on filesystem
• append_view_path: search for templates first on filesystem, then in your resolver

NOTE: the above methods are both class and instance methods.

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  prepend_view_path TemplateStorage.resolver

  def index
    # as you may already know, rails will serve 'some/index' template by default, but it doesn't care where it is stored.
  end

  def show
    # explicit render
    render :template => 'custom_template'
  end

  def custom_template
    # use another model to fetch templates
    prepend_view_path AnotherModel.resolver
  end
end

And let's say you want to use database template resolving in all your controllers, but want to use panoramic only for certain paths (prefixed with X) you can use

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  prepend_view_path TemplateStorage.resolver(:only => 'use_this_prefix_only')
end

This helps reducing the number of database requests, if Rails for example tries to look for layouts per controller.

class MyEmail < ActionMailer::Base
  prepend_view_path TemplateStorage.resolver

Using prepend_view_path/append_view_path you are stuck to the current context (e.g. the method calling "mail"). If you want to dynamically change the path depending on a certain variable, call the prepend_view_path/append_view_path inside the method's context with an additional path variable. This could be useful, if you want to use only one method for sending different templates depending on the template.path .

class MyEmail < ActionMailer::Base

  def method_that_sets_resolver_path
    prepend_view_path TemplateStorage.resolver(:path => model.path)
  end

Need more help? Check out spec/dummy/, you'll find a dummy rails app I used to make tests ;-)

Enter Panoramic gem path, run bundle install to install development and test dependencies, then rake spec.

• add generators

Fork, make your changes, then send a pull request.

The main idea was heavily inspired from José Valim's awesome book Crafting Rails Applications. It helped me to better understand some Rails internals.