Introduction

Development of dry-view has ceased. Please switch to hanami-view for a compatible replacement.

dry-view is a complete, standalone view rendering system that gives you everything you need to write well-factored view code.

Use dry-view if:

  • You recognize that view code can be complex, and want to work with a system that allows you to break your view logic apart into sensible units
  • You want to be able to unit test all aspects of your views, in complete isolation
  • You want to maintain a sensible separation of concerns between the layers of functionality within your app
  • You want to build and render views in any kind of context, not just when serving HTTP requests
  • You're using a lightweight routing DSL like Roda or Sinatra and you want to keep your routes clean and easy to understand (dry-view handles the integration with your application, so all you need to provide from routes is the user-provided input params)
  • Your application structure supports dependency injection as the preferred way to share behaviour between components (e.g. dry-view fits perfectly with dry-system, dry-container, and dry-auto_inject)

Concepts

dry-view divides the responsibility of view rendering across several different components:

  • The View, representing a view in its entirety, holding its configuration as well as any application-provided dependencies
  • Exposures, defined as part of the view, declare the values that should be exposed to the template, and how they should be prepared
  • Templates and partials, which contain the markup, code, and logic that determine the view's output. Templates may have different formats, which act as differing representations of a given view
  • Parts, which wrap the values exposed to the template and provide a place to encapsulate view-specific behavior along with particular values
  • Scopes, which offer a place to encapsulate view-specific behaviour intended for a particular template and its complete set of values
  • Context, a single object providing the baseline environment for a given rendering, with its methods made available to all templates, partials, parts, and scopes

Example

Configure your view, accept some dependencies, and define an exposure:

require "dry/view"

class ArticleView < Dry::View
  config.paths = [File.join(__dir__, "templates")]
  config.part_namespace = Parts
  config.layout = "application"
  config.template = "articles/show"

  attr_reader :article_repo

  def initialize(article_repo:)
    @article_repo = article_repo
  end

  expose :article do |slug:|
    article_repo.by_slug(slug)
  end
end

Write a layout (templates/layouts/application.html.erb):

<html>
  <body>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

And a template (templates/articles/show.html.erb):

<h1><%= article.title %></h1>
<p><%= article.byline_text %></p>

Define a part to provide view-specific behavior around the exposed article value:

module Parts
  class Article < Dry::View::Part
    def byline_text
      authors.map(&:name).join(", ")
    end
  end
end

Then #call your view to render the output:

view = ArticleView.new
view.call(slug: "cheeseburger-backpack").to_s
# => "<html><body><h1>Cheeseburger Backpack</h1><p>Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey</p></body></html>

Dry::View::#call expects keyword arguments for input data. These arguments are handled by your exposures, which prepare view parts that are passed to your template for rendering.

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