how to display an exsiting xml file to user in RoR

Question

Hi,

I have an xml file and I want to display(render) it as it is to the user, i.e I want to keep the tags. How should I do in RoR?

I have tried render :file=>"/path/to/file.xml", but the tag <product> disappeared.

//file.xml
<product>car</product>

Update: I found the behavior is browers-dependent

• Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3

  The tags are kept.

• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; zh-CN; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15

  The tags disappeared.

Answer 1

Hi,
have you tried to add

:content_type => 'application/xml'

to your render line?

render :file=>"/path/to/file.xml", :content_type => 'application/xml'

Answer 2

Add an xml prolog line to the file (in addition to the content type suggestion from jhwist).

<?xml version="1.0"?>

Answer 3

Different browsers display XML differently. Some try to be smart, others don't. You can't rely on that. If you want to display XML "as is" you need to render escaped XML as text.

In your controller action you'll have to call this:

render :text => @template.h(File.read("/path/to/file.xml"))

This will escape all HTML for you and act as plain text.