Rails 3 - Truncate in a Controller?

Question

In my controller, I'm building a json object for books. I want to show truncate(book.content, 250).

This doesn't work in a rails controller. And given it's a JSON render, I don't use a view. So how does one truncate? I don't want my JSON object to be huge :)!

Thanks.

Very confusing. I want to build a JSON object with a text field but only show 250 chars... So I need to truncate. But Rails doesn't let you truncate in a View or Model, so where do I build the JSON object? — TheExit

mdrozdziel mdrozdziel · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-27T07:31:42

You can use many ways to accomplish this. The most conviniet one would be to just include the proper helper in the controller. In this it would be:

class BooksController < ApplicationController
  include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
  ...
end

Alternatively you can also create a partial which generates the code you need, for example _truncate.html.erb with proper code:

<%= truncate (@book, :length => 250) %>

And then render it in your view:

result = render_to_string :partial => 'truncate'

Hope this helps.

Rails 3 - Truncate in a Controller?

2 Answers