Prettifying Builder::XmlMarkup.new

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've got a web service which outputs XML. I'm generating it very conveniently by creating a file in the view named index.xml.builder. That all works great, almost.

I can write that file very simply and cleanly like this:

xml.instruct! xml.search do   xml.total @results[:total] end

That's really maintainable, but the output contains lots of extra spaces and newlines that muck it up. I can get rid of all the spaces by adding this line to the top of each xml.builder file:

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new

But that takes out ALL the spaces and newlines, so the entire output is on one line. What I want is something in the middle. Through experimentation, I've explicitly added newlines and spaces where I want them, but suddenly the file is no longer as easily maintainable:

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new xml.instruct! xml.text!("\n") xml.search do   xml.text!("\n ")   xml.total @results[:total] end

Does anyone know of a cleaner approach where I get the maintainability of the top example with the output of the bottom example?

Thanks!

2

I've got a web service which outputs XML. I'm generating it very conveniently by creating a file in the view named index.xml.builder. That all works great, almost.

I can write that file very simply and cleanly like this:

xml.instruct! xml.search do xml.total @results[:total] end

That's really maintainable, but the output contains lots of extra spaces and newlines that muck it up. I can get rid of all the spaces by adding this line to the top of each xml.builder file:

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new

But that takes out ALL the spaces and newlines, so the entire output is on one line. What I want is something in the middle. Through experimentation, I've explicitly added newlines and spaces where I want them, but suddenly the file is no longer as easily maintainable:

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new xml.instruct! xml.text!("\n") xml.search do xml.text!("\n ") xml.total @results[:total] end

Does anyone know of a cleaner approach where I get the maintainability of the top example with the output of the bottom example?

Couldn't you run the output through pp?

Walter

3

Maybe if I knew how. I'm not sure how to insert pp after the view template.

My controllers look like this:

respond_to do |format|   format.html   format.xml end

And I don't understand the magic enough to know how to put pp in there.

Also, I was looking at the documentation for pp and it's not clear what it will do with a string in xml format. If I could solve the first problem I'll experiment with it.

4

Try xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent=>2)

5

Thanks. That's where I started. That does two things: it indents the markup just like I want, but it does a second thing, too. It leaves all the white space that exists in the xml.builder file also, so that the resultant XML document is really ugly and contains extra newlines and extra spaces.