resource_feeder, simply_restful and views

[Jodi Showers]

Greetings all.

This topic is not a question, but a 'how do I do that'.

If you've had the chance to use the rails resource_feeder plugin, you'll love the ease with which rss/atom feeds can be rendered.

My grief came when I tried to juice up my rss/atom descriptions with some sweet html, and came under the impression that item descriptions were limited to the a single designated attribute on your model, so I set out to improve resource_feeder to permit descriptions to be specified by rendering a view... 

turns out my assumption was wrong, and you can render a view using a Proc and render_to_string as follows:

for plain text descriptions,

  :description => Proc.new {|o| render_to_string(:partial => 'show_text', :locals => {:object => o, :fred => fred}) }

and for html descriptions,

 :content_encoded => Proc.new {|o| render_to_string(:partial => 'show_html', :locals => {:object => o, :fred => fred}) }

that's it - now your rss/atom descriptions will be rendered from the partial 'show'. Just remember to use render_to_string otherwise you'll get a DoubleRender exception.

note: in order to use resource_feeder and the latest simply_helpful, you'll have to manually [1]patch resource_feeder to match new simply_helpful packaging.

[1] http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/7468

"One last thing" - if you're feeding a nested resource, you may have to use the link option - I couldn't get nested routes to work  and had to specify the option link as :

  :link => Proc.new {|o|  object_url(master_object_objectt.id, o.id)},

that's it - happy feeding all, and thanx to team-core for the Proc interface.

Jodi