Rendering HTML in rails without actually displaying it

Question

Hello all,

My current project requires me to assemble a .zip file containing HTML and text-only templates for a user to download, for importing into an email marketing program.

I've inherited this project, and currently the code uses a "fake" model (that is a model that does not directly correlate to a database table), in which it stores the entire template in a string, using dynamic variables to populate certain areas. The "fake" model then has a method for creating a zip file.

It seems to me that there has to be a better way to do this. I was wondering if there was a way to move the template into a .erb/haml file, and then write a method that would populate the file in preparation for being zipped up? Basically, is there a way to render an HTML and text file, without actually having to display them?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Please have a look at the cells plugin.

Answer 2

Just write the action and view to render the html and text as normal then use the render_to_string method to assign the content to strings

http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/Base/render_to_string

Then you can run the Model method (hopefully a Class method) to create the zip file using the content you now have in instance variables