Waffle: How to access your Java components from your Ruby Actions.

In my last post I gave an overview of how you can easily integrate JRuby with Waffle. Now we will examine Ruby based controller in a bit more depth. Lets assume we have the following Waffle Registrar for our application:

public class MyRegistrar extends AbstractRubyAwareRegistrar {

  public MyRegistrar(Registrar delegate) {
    super(delegate);
  }

  @Override
  public void application() {
    register("the_dao", PersonDAOImpl.class);

    registerRubyScript("person", "PersonController");
  }
}

A DAO, PersonDAOImpl, is registered under the name "the_dao" and we have one Ruby based controller available. Now its probably safe to assume that this Ruby PersonController will need access to the DAO. Gaining access to this DAO from the controller is easy in Waffle, just call the locate method:

class PersonController

  def index
    @person_dao = locate(example.PersonDAO)

    @people = @person_dao.findAll
    render 'person.rhtml'
  end

end

Notice that we were able to retrieve the DAO by its interface. Additionally, since this DAO was registered with a key you can use a convention to retrieve the component. The convention is "locate_<component key>", here is the same controller using the locate_ convention:

class PersonController

  def index
    @person_dao = locate_the_dao

    @people = @person_dao.findAll
    render 'person.rhtml'
  end

end

As you can see this makes writing Ruby based Controllers/Actions with Waffle really easy. In my next post I'll detail how to access request parameter and context attributes with ease.

Argible: testing argible-ized actions

Last week Jay Fields and I were discussing Argible and he asked, "How's testing an action that uses Argible?", the answer ... easy.

Suppose we have the following Controller with an argible-ized action:

class CalculatorController < ApplicationController

  argible(:first => :to_i, :second => :to_i)
  def add(first, second)
    @result = first + second
  end

end

And here is the associated RSpec test:

describe CalculatorController, "add action" do
  controller_name :calculator

  it "should add argument values" do
    post :add, :first => "18", :second => "2"
    controller.instance_variable_get(:@result).should == 20
  end

end

You can see from the test that you do not need to do anything special to test your argible annotated action methods. Just call the action with whatever parameter name and values your action requires.