LarryOnLine

I really like Markaby for HTML templates. I think it’s especially good if Ruby programmers are creating and updating the views. If you have to get a designer involved (i.e. non Rubyist) maybe ERB or Haml would be better, but, otherwise it’s great, because everything is Ruby.

So, I started out trying to get Markaby working with Rails 2.1.0. With some hours of confusion as to why it didn’t work and digging into Rails and Markaby code, I came up with the following two hacks which patch up Markaby to work with changes in the Rails rendering code.

In vendor/plugins/markaby/init.rb, change

ActionView::Base::register_template_handler 'mab',  Markaby::Rails::ActionViewTemplateHandler

to

ActionView::Template::register_template_handler 'mab',  Markaby::Rails::ActionViewTemplateHandler

Create config/initializers/markaby_fixup.rb:

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# see http://onemanswalk.com/work/2007/12/13/using-markaby-w-rails-2-0-1/
ActionView::Base
class ActionView::Base
  def string_path(string)
    string
  end
end

Markaby::Rails::ActionViewTemplateHandler
class Markaby::Rails::ActionViewTemplateHandler
  def compilable?; false; end

  def render(template)
    assigns = @action_view.instance_vars.to_h.merge(template.locals)
    builder = Markaby::Rails::Builder.new(assigns, @action_view)
    eval_args = [template.source, template.filename].compact
    builder.capture { instance_eval(*eval_args) }
  end
end

So this was working fine until I updated to Rails 2.1.1, at which time I got several errors like the following:

undefined method `/people/1320/edit_path' for #<ActionView::Base:0x3d0a090>
On line #26 of people/show.html.mab

    23:   text h(@person.maiden_name)
    24: end
    25: 
    26: link_to 'Edit', edit_person_path(@person)
    27: link_to 'Back', people_path

    vendor/plugins/markaby/lib/markaby/builder.rb:166:in `send'
    config/initializers/markaby_fixup.rb:26:in `method_missing'
    app/views/addresses/new.html.mab:30:in `render'
    vendor/plugins/markaby/lib/markaby/builder.rb:105:in `instance_eval'
    vendor/plugins/markaby/lib/markaby/builder.rb:105:in `capture'
    config/initializers/markaby_fixup.rb:17:in `render'
    spec/views/addresses/new.html.mab_spec.rb:18

I’ll keep digging to figure out how to fix my fix so I can continue to use Markaby, but really what I’m wondering is — am I the only one trying to us Markaby with recent versions of Rails? I found a relevant bug report or two, but no apparent action to fix them. I’m a little worried about the health of Markaby in relation to Rails.

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging and report back here if I work out anything.