controller plugin?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Do I understand correctly that you can't write controller plugins?

Of course "can't" is a big word, what I'm really wondering is what the major stumbling blocks to doing so are?

Am I missing something or wouldn't this be extremely useful?

Thanks! Tim

2

googling   rails controller plugin

got me here http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Controller+Extensions in short order.

Plugins are just code.

3

I was reading this article: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2006/05/04/the-complete-guide-to-rails-plugins-part-i

to quote:

"Controllers: You can't directly write a controller plugin, but you can write a generator that copies a controller to your app/controllers directory. Intermediate difficulty."

???

Tim

4

Outside of me being unable to really understand what “controller plugin” means in the quote, the article is from over a year ago.

If you’re trying to add macros or what not to controllers, you simply do:

ActionController::Base.send(:include, MyModuleOfMethods)

in your plugin/init.rb

What are you trying to do tmac?

Jason

5

I think that's pretty much the answer I was hoping for Jason! So the article is wrong and yes you can write controller plugins... thought that was odd!

I have a site/project where I use a controller base class that handles all the standard REST methods (new, show, edit, etc...) in a fairly generic way. It would certainly take some work but I thought it might be nice to share it as a plugin... at least for my own projects, and others if there is any interest.

I have looked a bit but haven't seen anything like it. Is there a plugin that already does something similar?

Thanks a ton Jason! Tim

6

Hi Tim

Have you taken a lookat activescaffold ? Imanot sure towhat extentisit RESTful...

7

I think that's pretty much the answer I was hoping for Jason! So the article is wrong and yes you can write controller plugins... thought that was odd!

Yes and no. What the article is saying is that you can't have
foo_controller in your plugin, install your plugin and then try to
access http://myapp.com/foo I think that there is stuff afoot so that you can specify the paths
searched for views & controllers, but out of the box it won't work. What you can of course do is a generator, provide modules for
controllers or extend ActionController with macros and so on.

Fred

8

> > I think that's pretty much the answer I was hoping for Jason! So the > article is wrong and yes you can write controller plugins... thought > that was odd!

Yes and no. What the article is saying is that you can't have foo_controller in your plugin, install your plugin and then try to access http://myapp.com/foo I think that there is stuff afoot so that you can specify the paths searched for views & controllers, but out of the box it won't work. What you can of course do is a generator, provide modules for controllers or extend ActionController with macros and so on.

Hmmm, looks like you already can. Try adding your load paths to:

* MyController.template_root * ActionController::Routing.controller_paths * Dependencies.load_paths

Demo:

$ cat vendor/plugins/test_plugin/init.rb config.after_initialize do   path = File.expand_path('app/controllers', File.dirname(__FILE__))   ActionController::Routing.controller_paths << path   Dependencies.load_paths << path end

$ cat vendor/plugins/test_plugin/app/controllers/test_plugin_controller.rb class TestPluginController < ApplicationController   self.template_root = File.expand_path('../views', File.dirname(__FILE__))   def test   end end

$ cat vendor/plugins/test_plugin/app/views/test_plugin/test.rhtml hi

$ script/console Loading development environment.

app.get('/test_plugin/test'); puts app.response.body

hi => nil

9

Thanks for setting me down the right path here guys... It appears to be relatively straight forward.

CHH - I'm only vaguely familiar with activescaffold ... I was really trying to avoid a generator ... unless I'm misunderstanding they typically generate a lot of very similar code over and over ... this is for more than just admin stuff too:-)

I really just want to be able to inherit functionality into my controllers.

Tim