sinatra_respond_to

www.github.com/cehoffman/sinatra-respond_to

DESCRIPTION:

A respond_to style Rails block for baked-in web service support in Sinatra

FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

Handles setting charset for appropriate types
Handles setting the content type depending on what is being served
Automatically can adjust XmlHTTPRequests to return Javascript

SYNOPSIS:

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<br />

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<br />

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<br />

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.

REQUIREMENTS:

sinatra 0.9 - 0.10

INSTALL:

gem install sinatra-respond_to

CAVEATS:

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

DEVELOPERS:

After checking out the source, run:

$ rake newb

This task will install any missing dependencies, run the tests/specs, and generate the RDoc.

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.

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.