render widget: Views::Hello does not work as expected

[leafo]

• The delegate_object you use for the rendering_context is a controller instance instead of the view_context, so view helpers are not available (and other weird stuff happens)
• If you have Erector installed alongside Fortitude, because you don't strip the :widget option, Erector tries to render the Fortitude widget somewhere deep within render_without_fortitude
• Passing a class instead of an instance does not work (it should use view_context.assigns for needs by default)
• After patching some of these things, I was unable it to make it actually work at all. It manipulates the options with the :text option correctly, but my layout still renders empty. (I noticed if I disabled the layout then the content would come through)

Lastly, I'm curious why you chose to do it the way you did, Erector does the following to register a :widget renderer:

require 'action_controller/metal/renderers'

ActionController.add_renderer :widget do |widget, options|
  # return result of render
end

[leafo]

Using add_renderer will also make render_to_string widget: Widget work correctly too.

[ageweke]

OK, I'm looking at this right now. Some of this stuff is just me not knowing about view_context or add_renderer, which I will now use. It's also test cases that I was missing. I imagine it will all be relatively quick to fix…stand by.

[leafo]

As a side note, I don't think the add_renderer approach adds the layout when passing layout: true. It never worked in Erector, so I'm not too concerned, but it would probably be nice to have.

[leafo]

view_context is equal to the template_handler argument that you receive in Fortitude::Rails::Renderer.render btw

[leafo]

add_renderer does not work well if two renderers of the same name are added. It appears to keep the first one only. I ended up patching Erector::Rails.render in my initializer so I could still render widgets even if Erector is loaded first: (this also handles passing a class as the widget options)

If you're planning on keeping erector/fortitude at same time support you can use or modify this.

module Erector
  module Rails
    class << self
      def render_with_fortitude(widget, view, local_assigns = {}, is_partial = false, options = {})
        if widget.is_a?(Class) && widget < ::Fortitude::Widget
          widget = widget.new widget.extract_needed_assigns_from(view.assigns)
        end

        if widget.is_a? ::Fortitude::Widget
          context = ::Fortitude::RenderingContext.new helpers_object: view

          widget.render_to(context)
          return context.output_buffer_holder.output_buffer.to_s
        end

        render_without_fortitude(widget, view, local_assigns, is_partial, options)
      end
      alias_method_chain :render, :fortitude
    end
  end
end

[ageweke]

OK, just added a whole bunch of specs to the branch ageweke/render_widget that, I think, handle all the cases you reported above. They all fail right now, but I'm going to work on making them pass, using add_renderer. They also cover the case of being able to use render :widget with both Erector and Fortitude widgets simultaneously, so I'm going to do my best to make that work correctly, too.

[ageweke]

(I have to take off for a few hours shortly, so the fixes will come later this evening, just as a heads-up.)

[ageweke]

OK, master now has fixes for all this stuff, and there are no issues that I know of remaining around this. I think I even took care of the difficult cases above — you now get layouts (unless you turn them off) using render :widget, and I monkeypatched ActionController.add_renderer so that even if Erector comes in to register its own handler for :widget, we re-register after to make sure both will still work. (It seems like ActionController is last-call-wins there.)

Assuming Travis is happy, I plan to cut 0.0.9 tomorrow with all these fixes.