Misuse

I’ve been looking into firing off events from the console (ruby script/console). It turns out to be easy – there’s a very nice write up of the basics here. One thing that was missing was how to get access to the response results from the command. I’ve got a method that’s working that I’ll share here.
Let’s say you’ve got a controller named “SampleController” with an action that looks (for simplicity) like:

def echo
  render(:text => 'echo!')
end

You can fire up the console with “ruby script/console” from your root Rails app folder. From this command line type this:

app.get('sample/echo')
output = app.html_document.root.to_s

Now the variable “output” holds a string representation of the html “payload” that would be delivered over html to a user’s browser. Kind of handy! Anyone with a better way to get at the html payload – please post comments here.

If you wanted to put this sort of thing into a rake task – you’d set it up as follows.. (First add to the top of your rake task the line:

require 'action_controller/integration'

Then add this code wherever is convenient:

namespace :actions do
desc "test action"
  task "echo" do
    app = ActionController::Integration::Session.new;
    app.get('/sample/echo')
    puts app.html_document.root.to_s
  end
end

Then you could fire this off with the command (from your Rails app folder):

rake actions:echo

I’ve been getting weird testing output when I run this from the command line -presumably related to the Integration::Session’s testing heritage? Anyone else getting this kind of spurious output? It’s more annoying than problematic:

Started

Finished in 0.0 seconds.

0 tests, 0 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors