Responders

A set of responders modules to dry up your Rails 3 app. If you are interested in the version to be used with Rails 2.3 together with Inherited Resources, please check this branch instead:

http://github.com/plataformatec/responders/tree/v0.4
  • FlashResponder - Sets the flash based on the controller action and resource status. For instance, if you do: respond_with(@post) on a POST request and the resource @post does not contain errors, it will automatically set the flash message to “Post was successfully created” as long as you configure your I18n file:

    flash:
      actions:
        create:
          notice: "%{resource_name} was successfully created."
        update:
          notice: "%{resource_name} was successfully updated."
        destroy:
          notice: "%{resource_name} was successfully destroyed."
          alert: "%{resource_name} could not be destroyed."
    

    In case the resource contains errors, you should use the failure key on I18n. This is useful to dry up flash messages from your controllers. If you need a specific message for a controller, let’s say, for PostsController, you can also do:

    flash:
      posts:
        create:
          notice: "Your post was created and will be published soon"
    

    This responder is activated in all non get requests. By default it will use the keys :notice and :alert, but they can be changed in your application:

config.responders.flash_keys = [ :success, :failure ]

Or:

  Responders::FlashResponder.flash_keys = [ :success, :failure ]
  • HttpCacheResponder - Automatically adds Last-Modified headers to API requests. This allows clients to easily query the server if a resource changed and if the client tries to retrieve a resource that has not been modified, it returns not_modified status.

  • CollectionResponder - Makes your create and update action redirect to the collection on success.

Configuring your own responder

The first step is instal responders gem and configure it in your application:

gem install responders

Responders only provides a set of modules, to use them, you have to create your own responder. This can be done inside the lib folder for example:

# lib/app_responder.rb
class AppResponder < ActionController::Responder
  include Responders::FlashResponder
  include Responders::HttpCacheResponder
end

And then you need to configure your application to use it:

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
require "app_responder"

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  self.responder = AppResponder
  respond_to :html
end

Or, for your convenience, just do:

rails generate responders:install

Controller method

This gem also includes the controller method ‘responders’, which allows you to cherry-pick which responders you want included in your controller.

class InvitationsController < ApplicationController
  responders :flash, :http_cache
end

Generator

This gem also includes a responders controller generator, so your scaffold can be customized to use respond_with instead of default respond_to blocks. Installing this gem automatically sets the generator.

Bugs and Feedback

If you discover any bugs or want to drop a line, feel free to create an issue on GitHub.

github.com/plataformatec/responders/issues

MIT License. Copyright 2010 Plataforma Tecnologia. blog.plataformatec.com.br