Arbre - HTML Views in Ruby
Arbre makes it easy to generate HTML directly in Ruby. This gem was extracted from Active Admin.
Simple Usage
html = Arbre::Context.new do
h2 "Why is Arbre awesome?"
ul do
li "The DOM is implemented in ruby"
li "You can create object oriented views"
li "Templates suck"
end
end
puts html.to_s # =>
<h2>Why is Arbre awesome?</h2>
<ul>
<li>The DOM is implemented in ruby</li>
<li>You can create object oriented views</li>
<li>Templates suck</li>
</ul>
The DOM in Ruby
The purpose of Arbre is to leave the view as ruby objects as long as possible. This allows OO Design to be used to implement the view layer.
html = Arbre::Context.new do
h2 "Why Arbre is awesome?"
end
html.children.size # => 1
html.children.first # => #<Arbre::HTML::H2>
Components
The purpose of Arbre is to be able to create shareable and extendable HTML components. To do this, you create a subclass of Arbre::Component.
For example:
class Panel < Arbre::Component
builder_method :panel
def build(title, attributes = {})
super(attributes)
h3(title, class: "panel-title")
end
end
The builder_method defines the method that will be called to build this component when using the DSL. The arguments passed into the builder_method will be passed into the #build method for you.
You can now use this panel in any Arbre context:
html = Arbre::Context.new do
panel "Hello World", id: "my-panel" do
span "Inside the panel"
end
end
puts html.to_s # =>
<div class='panel' id="my-panel">
<h3 class='panel-title'>Hello World</h3>
<span>Inside the panel</span>
</div>
Text Nodes
To insert unwrapped text nodes use text_node
:
html = Arbre::Context.new do
panel "Hello World", id: "my-panel" do
span "Inside the panel"
text_node "Plain text"
end
end
puts html.to_s # =>
<div class='panel' id="my-panel">
<h3 class='panel-title'>Hello World</h3>
<span>Inside the panel</span>
Plain text
</div>