About

Examples

require 'sinatra'
require 'sinatra/respond_to'

get '/posts' do
  @posts = Post.recent

  respond_to do |wants|
    wants.html { haml :posts }      # => views/posts.html.haml, also sets content_type to text/html
    wants.rss { haml :posts }       # => views/posts.rss.haml, also sets content_type to application/rss+xml
    wants.atom { haml :posts }      # => views/posts.atom.haml, also sets content_type to appliation/atom+xml
  end
end

get '/post/:id' do
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])

  respond_to do |wants|
    wants.html { haml :post }       # => views/post.html.haml, also sets content_type to text/html
    wants.xhtml { haml :post }      # => views/post.xhtml.haml, also sets content_type to application/xhtml+xml
    wants.xml { @post.to_xml }      # => sets content_type to application/xml
    wants.js { erb :post }          # => views/post.js.erb, also sets content_type to application/javascript
  end
end

get '/comments/:id' do
  @comment = Comment.find(params[:id])

  respond_to do |wants|
    wants.html { haml :comment }    # => views/comment.html.haml, also sets content_type to text/html
    wants.json { @comment.to_json } # => sets content_type to application/json
    wants.js { erb :comment }       # => views/comment.js.erb, also sets content_type to application/javascript
  end
end

To change the character set of the response, there is a charset helper. For example

get '/iso-8859-1' do
  charset 'iso-8859-1'
  "This is now sent using iso-8859-1 character set"
end

get '/respond_to-mixed' do
  respond_to do |wants|
    wants.html { charset 'iso-8859-1'; "Some html in iso-8859-1" }
    wants.xml { builder :utf-8-xml }    # => this is returned in the default character set
  end
end

Configuration

There a few options available for configuring the default behavior of respond_to using Sinatra's set utility.

• default_charset - utf-8
  Assumes all text documents are encoded using this character set. This can be overridden within the respond_to block for the appropriate format
• default_content - :html
  When a user vists a url without an extension, for example /post this will be the assumed content to serve first. Expects a symbol as used in setting content_type.
• assume_xhr_is_js - true
  To avoid headaches with accept headers, and appending .js to urls, this will cause the default format for all XmlHttpRequests to be classified as wanting Javascript in the response.

Installing

sudo gem install cehoffman-sinatra-respond_to --source=http://gems.github.com

Cavaets

Due to the way respond_to works, all incoming requests have the extension striped from the request.path_info. This causes routes like the following to fail.

get '/style.css' do
  content_type :css, :charset => 'utf-8'
  sass :style   # => renders views/style.sass
end

They need to be changed to the following. Note that you no longer have to set the content_type or charset.

get '/style' do
  sass :style   # => renders views/style.css.sass
end

If you want to ensure the route only gets called for css requests try this. This will use sinatra's built in accept header matching.

get '/style', :provides => :css do
  sass :style
end

Issues

Sinatra has a bug that affects Classic style applications and extensions see #215 and #180. I have worked around this by explicitly registering RespondTo with the top level Sinatra::Application when requiring sinatra/respond_to.