/acts_as_continuable

Continuations in your ActionController actions.

Primary LanguageRuby

acts_as_continuable

Continuations in your ActionController actions.

Requirements

Since it uses Continuations and callcc, it will only run on MRI. Sorry, no JRuby or IronRuby. Additionally, you need to set Rails’ session store to use memory. Add this line to environment.rb

config.action_controller.session_store = :memory_store

Description

This plugin for Rails allows you to declare actions in your controllers that look like this:

def_continued :my_method
  render :partial => 'form_part_1'
  continue

  render :partial => 'form_part_2'
  continue

  render :partial => 'form_part_3'
end

To use it, include ActsAsContinuable in your controller class

When you call continue, your action execution is paused and stored in the session to return to later. This allows you to handle multiple request/response cycles within a single action. The back button works as well as long as action execution hasn’t actually completed. The action will rewind execution to the appropriate point.

within your view, an instance variable @context_id is available. In order to call back into the action, pass @context_id back as the GET or POST parameter :context_id within your view: e.g.:

<%= link_to :action => 'my_method', :context_id => @context_id %>

Issues

Currently when you try to shut down mongrel, it waits for the backing threads stored in the session to exit. They are, of course paused, so mongrel waits a minute before killing them.

Wha??

Questions, comments, and patches about/for this arm-twisting of an experiment for Rails? Contact me at firstname@lastname.name

License

acts_as_continuable is Copyright © 2008 Matt Freels and is released under the following license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.