In Rails how can I get the contents of a page without making an HTTP request?

Question

This may be really obvious, but in rails how can I get the contents of a page without making an HTTP request?

i.e. I want to grab the contents of any page that my rails app generates, in a script on the same server. This is of course trivial with an HTTP request, but how can I get the contents of a page otherwise?

This is what I am doing now which works fine:

require 'open-uri'

contents = open("http://localhost/path_to_my_page").read # but I really want to get rid of the overhead of the HTTP request

I need to be able to do this from a script, within the rails app, not a controller (e.g. with render_to_string)

Answer 1

In your controller , you can call render_to_string instead of render and the page is returned instead of being send to the browser.
The arguments of both methods are the same, so you need to specify which controller and action you require to render.

Answer 2

Why not use erb directly? See this question for more details

Answer 3

This is how you get the contents of a page in the console. It might work for you:

require 'action_controller/integration'
app = ActionController::Integration::Session.new;
app.get('/path_to_your_page')
puts app.response.body