In rails, can I access response.body in a action before it returns?

Question

In rails, can I access response.body in a action before it returns?

Say I want to do some final string replacements before it returns, can I get access to response.b

Answer 1

The poor-man's way is to do this:

str = render_to_string "mycontroller/mytemplate"
str.gsub!(/blah/,'')
render :text => str 

Answer 2

Try after_filter in your controller.

You should be able to edit your response.body from there. For me, I needed to remove some ASCII characters in the xml hence I did this.

after_filter :sanitize_xml

def sanitize_xml
   #clean the response body by accessing response.body

Answer 3

You can write a rack middleware to do such kind of replacements. Code for the rack is.

module Dump
  require 'rack'

  class Response
    def initialize(app)
       @app=app
    end

    def call(env)
       res=@app.call(env)
       res.body #change this and but also update res.length and header["Content-Length"]
       return res
    end
  end
end

include it in some file, lets call it dump_response.rb in RAILS_ROOT/lib folder. And line

use Dump::Response

in config.ru

Answer 4

You can simply overwrite rails render function in a controller, like this:

def render *args, &block
  super
  response.body.gsub!(/blah/,'')
end