Include contents of a file in a view

rubyonrails-talk
1

Guys,

I have an application and part of its function is to display html marked up text files to the users, inlined in the current page layout. I have the files stored outside the Rails app directories, and not in the database.

What I want to do is something like this in my view:

<h1>Viewing contents of filename</h1> <%= send_file( ... ) -%>

So that my normal layout gets put around the included file.

I know I could easily create a helper, say, my_send_file that takes the filename and returns its contents, but it means the entire file will be pulled into memory (the files could be a reasonable size, but not massive!). I guess if the files were in the database I would have to pull the data out of the database into memory anyway, making this an equivalent process.

Basically I want to know

1. Is there a builtin way to do this, or will I just go ahead and create a helper (I don't think the send_file method is going to be any good for me here). 2. When rendering a large page, does Rails stream it to the user, or does it build it all in memory, and then stream it? Just curious on this one ...

Thanks,

Stephen.

2

Open the file, iterate through the lines and parse it with CodeRay or something similar to get syntax highlighting.

File.open("the_filename.html", "r").each { |line| puts line }

Etc.

Not sure about the 2nd one. I'm pretty sure it keeps the page in memory until it's sent to the user, then removes it from memory - at least that's what makes most sense.

3

I'm almost 100% it's not possible to read an entire file to send to the user without reading it into memory first. But you shouldn't be worried about that, memory is fast and I'm assuming your files are less than 1MB (since they are HTML). If they are bigger than 1MB, then you should be worried about bandwidth and browsers rendering 1MB of HTML.

I hope that helps.

4

Yea thats pretty much what I did in a help.

Cheers for the hint on Coderay - that may be useful for some of the stuff I need to do!

5

Reckoned that was the case - cheers for the input, thought it would be worth checking just incase!