Executing .rb file within view

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello everyone,

I need to execute a ruby script from within my view. It's a script that dynamically generates an image as output, so the invocation should look something like this: <%= image_tag "/images/myScript.rb?args=foobar"%>

Now I don't know how to configure WEBrick to execut the ruby file when I put it in my project folder in public/images and access it through localhost:3000/project/images/myScript.rb When doing so, my browser displays the source of myScript.rb instead of executing it.

Another possibility would certainly be to run my script as a webserver on a different port and invoking it like this: <%= image_tag "localhost:3001/myScript.rb?args=foobar"%> but a second server running seems to be a little bit of overkill to me.

I'd apreciate any suggestions. If there is any better way to do this, please let me know.

Thanks a lot, Frank

2

You could use rails and call your script from a controller then render it : render :text => result_from_script or render :inline => result_from_script

3

thanks for the quick reply. this approach may insert some external HTML or whatever into my final output to the browser, but I cannot embed the image like this, right? The idea is to invoke the script from the client and produce a HTML response followed by the image data. The reason for this is because the image is not saved as a file (for performance), so I have to directly send it to the client after computation.

frank

4

I have just discovered the "send_data" method which seems to do exactly what I need: send a string containing binary data to the client. It even lets me specify the content type, so it's perfect for my purpose. I'll try it out and let you know if it worked out.

Frank

5

it worked out pefectly. I created an additional controller that solely returns the image using send_data() instead of rendering any template.

thanks for your help. frank