Using Rails Resolver Api

Yesterday at work, we decided to improve our user experience in web mobile.

We decided it was time to create a different view for each action. In Rails 4 there is this really cool feature called Variants

Depending on the variant you set phone || tablet usually from a before_action inside your ApplicationController, rails will be smart enough to render the proper layout and the right view, only with the condition that you add the variants to the file name show.html+mobile.erb.

Our problem is that we have a complex Rails 3.2 application with many dependencies, which is quite difficult to upgrade to Rails 4.1.

So I implemented a simple but effective version of the variant feature.

At first, I was lost on implementing this in the best way possible. My first approach was to create a simple method, render_template, that was added to every controller action. The method will decide which template to use based on the request.user_agent. Of course, there were better ideas than that one. I had to write a lot of respond_to blocks all over the application.

One friend of mine pointed me in the right direction. Rails Resolvers, also to this great book Crafting Rails Appliactions.

The book has many tutorials for building plugins to extend rails functionality.

Ok, so armed with my book and enthusiasm, I decided to try it again.

I had to create a simple class called ‘MobileViewResolver’ with just two methods.

class MobileViewresolver < ::ActionView::FileSystemResolver
  def initialize
    super('app/views', ":prefix/:action{.:locale,}{.:formats,}{+:variants,}{.:handlers,}")
  end

  def find_templates(name, prefix, partial, details)
    details['variants'] = ['mobile']
    super(name, prefix, partial, details)
  end
end

The initialize method accepts two parameters: the path to look for the templates and a pattern. In this case, I use the one for rails 4.1, including the variants.

The find_templates method receives the template name, a prefix (i.e. the controller path), a boolean marking if the template is a partial or not and a hash with details.

We modify the details hash to include the mobile variant, and Rails will look for that pattern inside the app/views folder. If no file is found, it will fall back to the default ones.

We only have to include the new resolver in our controller.

prepend_view_paths MobileViewResolver.new

And that is all.

We manage to add this new feature with just a straightforward class.

Rails has some awesome APIs waiting to be used.