Rendering from a Model in Rails 3

Call me 'rebel', but it happened to me that I had to render text from a ruby class.
I was composing text withing a regular class to send personalized SMS's and I wanted to use 'erb' templates and some other view utilities. Even it is not the Rails way, I wanted to do so.

Here are the tricks I used to build the logic. Key points are:
- how to get access to the view context
- how to get access to the path and the erb templates
- hot to get access to the url helpers in case you need form an url

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base

 

   # Use the my_models/_my_model.txt.erb view to render this object as a string

  def to_s

    url = helpers.new_user_url :host => default_host

    view = ActionView::Base.new(views_path)

    text = view.render(

      :partial => 'my_models/my_model', :format => :txt,

      :locals => { :my_model => self, :url => url}

    )

  end

 

  private

  def views_path

    @views_path ||= Rails.configuration.paths.app.views.first

  end

  def self.helpers

    @helpers ||= Rails.application.routes.url_helpers

  end

  def default_host

    #you need to configure it in your /config/environments/*.rb files

    # for example:   config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'localhost:3000' }

    @default_host ||= Rails.configuration.action_mailer.default_url_options[:host]

  end

 

 

end