In looking at the API, I was surprised to see that using a URL to render a partial on some remote server wasn't a possibility. I can think of situations where that would be useful. Is there some alternative means of accomplishing that objective? Thanks for any input.
... doug
This is called XSS, or Cross Site Scripting. It’s a serious security hole and as such is prohibited by Javascript. You can only make Ajax calls to the same host.
Jason
This is called XSS, or Cross Site Scripting. It's a serious security hole and as such is prohibited by Javascript. You can only make Ajax calls to the
While I realize that partials are used primarily in conjunction with Ajax, they can be used elsewhere. I'm not talking about Ajax. I am simply looking for the best way to include a chunk of HTML code (i.e., a piece of a full HTML document) that is served from one web server within the HTML pages served by other web servers. It's like a remote include.
Thanks.
... doug
iframes are your best bet for that.
Jason
iframes are your best bet for that.
<iframe src="http://path.to.external/htmlfile"></iframe>
Jason
I hate to keep hammering on this; but, I am hopeful that if I persist I'll eventually be able to get across what I'm looking for. An iframe won't meet my needs for 2 reasons: (1) It places the content in a separate frame which can then be scrolled or whatever. I don't want a separate frame. I want to insert (include if you will) a remote chunk of html code into the current document. (2) iframes require a complete html document. I want to include a chunk of html code which is not a complete html document into the current html document. In short, I would like it to work just like a partial except that the source code for the partial is obtained from another server cross the network.
Thanks for the input.
... doug
Well, the only thing I can think of doing is building an HTTP request in your controller action and dealing with the resulting HTML as you wish. Assuming that by “source code of the partial” you mean it’s still in Erb form, then you’ll have to download the file from that remote server, save it in a retrievable place, which then makes it available as a regular partial. Of course you can also use wget and treat the response as a string as well, rendering it or running it through Erb as needed.
May I ask as to why you want to do this?
Jason
May I ask as to why you want to do this?
Absolutely. Let's say that you're a manufacturer of widgets for sale to the general public. You have a number of affiliates who market your widgets through their respective web sites. Without using frames, you want to provide master content on your web server that can be incorporated into the respective websites of your affiliates. Since you control the content you don't have to be concerned that the content being touted by your affiliates is out of date. Similarly, each your affiliates doesn't have to update their web sites whenever there is some change affecting the widget content such as a price change. You just update your master and it magically propogates to all of your affiliates. Finally, and this is one of the reasons that I don't want to use frames, if one carefully crafts both the content being served by your web server and the respective pages of the affiliates into which that content is inserted, an external style sheet can be used to style the content. That means that each of your affiliates can style the content that you provide so that it integrates nicely into their particular web site.
So, unless we can come up with something better, maybe I should look at your wget suggestion. What do you think?
Thanks for the input, BTW.
... doug
There's this thing called a webservice (whether it's REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, …) that is meant to do exactly that: provide a link to remote data. The only reason why you'd want to use the remote wgetting or curl'ing, or whatever, is if you have no control over the application on the other side. This probably isn't the case, as you want the remote server to serve you partials.
There are some really nifty features in EdgeRails (or available as a plugin) that are aimed at providing an easy and DRY method for accessing remote data through REST and it's called ActiveResource. It's like ActiveRecord for REST services. Ryan has been writing up some blog posts on this, they might help you get a better idea of the possibilities: ryandaigle.com
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Upon reflection, I decided this whole thing seems to be way too complicated for what I'm trying to accomplish. I decided to revisit Jason's suggestion of using wget. The only problem with it is it's a bit clumsy and lacks a bit in the elegance department. Then I reasoned that implementing a wget method in ruby probably isn't all that difficult. Upon further reflection I guessed that someone had probably already done it. So, I turned to Google to see what I could find. It turns out that this is incredibly easy to implement. So here's the source for my helper method:
def remote_include_partial(url) require 'open-uri' out="" open(url){ |f| out=out+f.read } end
I am a neophyte in Ruby programming. So, if anyone has any suggestions for improvement, I'd love to hear them.
Including a require within a method seems a bit strange to me; but, I don't know how else to do it within the context of a helper.
I'm thinking about expanding the code so that it will work with both remote and local partials. The code would test to see if the url begins with 'http:'. If it does, it's remote else it's local. If I do that, I'm wondering if there might be a better name for the argument now named 'url'.
Sometimes, it's inconvenient dealing with partials. It might be nice to have them as complete html documents. So, my second contemplated improvement would be to optionally allow for removing any beginning content down to and including any opening <body> and also removing any closing <body> and anything that follows.
Comments on any of the above are most welcome.
Thanks for the input.
... doug
Looks good to me. For the removal / parsing of information in the retrieved HTML, I highly suggest you check out hpricot: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/
Jason