Note: this project is archived. I'm not using this in any project anymore as there are better options. Check Hotwired

Simple Rails helper to render a ruby hash to a ES5/JavaScript object. While a hash like {a:2} in ruby looks like an acceptable object in JS-terms, {a:2}.to_s renders to a string something along the lines of {:a=>2}. Which fails badly in any JS-interpreter. #to_json would work in most situations, but not all. Hence render_as_js :)

Besides converting ruby's Hashes, this gem attempts to rerender the following things nicely in JS:

• Strings
• Date(Time)s
• Numbers
• Symbols
• Booleans
• nils

Note: this is no attempt to compile ruby to JavaScript, I don't want to go there.

This almost does the same trick: @data.to_json. Sadly that doesn't work very nicely for dates.

While sanitizing is done using the Rails sanitize helper; be really careful when passing unknown data through this gem (numbers and dates will (probably) be fine, but be careful with strings).

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'render_as_js'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install render_as_js

In your views try:

complex_hash = [{y: 12, x:Date.new(2017,1,1)}, {y: 12, x: Date.new(2017,1,2)}]
render_as_js complex_hash

This should output in your generated html:

[{y: 12, x: new Date('2017-01-01')}, {y: 12, x: new Date('2017-01-02')}]

The alternative with the standard #to_json is:

[{"y": 12, "x": "2017-01-01"}, {"y": 12, "x": "2017-01-02"}]

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/murb/render_as_js. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.