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:
          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.

Configuring your own responder

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

sudo gem install responders

Responders only provides a set of modules, to use them, you have to create your own responder. This can be done in an initializer for example:

class AppResponder < ActionController::Responder
  include Responders::FlashResponder
  include Responders::HttpCacheResponder
end

Or, for your convenience, just do:

rails generate responders_install

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 2009 Plataforma Tecnologia. blog.plataformatec.com.br