Upgrading to 0.5.0 from 0.4.3 encountering error "undefined method `render' for RablRails:Module"

[jiggneshhgohel]

Hello,

In our Rail-based API-only app we are generating JSONs by rendering object directly.

There are cases when you want to render object outside Rails view context. For instance to render objects in the console or to create message queue payloads. For these situations, you can use RablRails.render as show below:

RablRails.render(object, template, :view_path => 'app/views', :format => :json) #=> "{...}

Recently we have started upgrading our Rails to 5.1.2 and as part of bundle update rabl-rails gem got updated to v 0.5.0 from 0.4.3 (bundle update output snippet)

Fetching rabl-rails 0.5.0 (was 0.4.3)
Installing rabl-rails 0.5.0 (was 0.4.3)

Now we are running our rspec and encountering following error:

     Failure/Error: RablRails.render(serializable_object, template.name, view_path: template.root_path_for_api_version.to_s, format: :json)
     
     NoMethodError:
       undefined method `render' for RablRails:Module

I compared the source-code and found that in v 0.4.3 RablRails::Renderer module exists, however in 0.5.0 tree it is removed

Found this commit 12a3f0f in which RablRails::Renderer module was removed.

Since that is removed what is the alternate approach to render the object directly? We are using this same approach of rendering the object directly across our API-only application. So it is very critical that we need this behaviour to be available.

Note: Ours API application is built on Rails but not using rails built-in api-only features.

Please suggest the possible fixes for this removed behaviour.

[jiggneshhgohel]

@ccocchi can you please spare some time and provide your guidance on my problem above?

[nimashariatian]

+1 on this issue, would appreciate a ping @ccocchi

[ccocchi]

This module has been removed because it was trying to replicate too much ActionView internals for little gain and was poorly maintanable.

If you need the old behavior, you could try to copy https://github.com/ccocchi/rabl-rails/blob/v0.4.3/lib/rabl-rails/renderer.rb inside your application and either have RablRails extend it or call directly RablRails::Renderer.render as before.

[nimashariatian]

Thank for the update! what is new alternative to this @ccocchi :) also much appreciate the hard work

[iovis]

We've been using the following instead of RablRails::Renderer.render:

ApplicationController.render(
  template: 'api/v1/users/stats',
  assigns: { user: @user }
)

[jiggneshhgohel]

Using the suggestions in #88 (comment) I was able to resolve my problem I described in #88 (comment) but I needed few customizations to be made which I have detailed in https://gist.github.com/jiggneshhgohel/1f0137e5dc294cc94141785eaf836c87.

Thanks