Comments on: Ask the readers: How do you keep DRY when exposing your Rails apps to iGoogle?

By: Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:10:48 +0000

I’d define a custom MIME type in the Rails initializers:

Mime::Type.register_alias “text/html”, :igoogle

then in your respond_to block have a format.igoogle that renders the appropriate layout.

Store an igoogle flag in the session.

See http://www.locomotivation.com/blog/2008/06/29/redesign-your-site-in-place-using-rails-custom-mime-types.html for a similar setup.

By: Nathan Hammond

Nathan Hammond — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:59:59 +0000

I’d look into a combination approach of a JavaScript link rewriter and session-based handling. I’m thinking along the lines of checking to see if your app is iframed (anti-clickjacking method) and then rewrite/set session vars accordingly.

A combination approach with CSRF-type protection (hidden secret in window.name) will give you more control if you actually need to use iframes in your application.

By: Antares Trader

Antares Trader — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:52:59 +0000

If I were doing this I would go with #2 and use a custom igoogle format in my url. I know this got backported to rails from merb, but I’m not sure on the details. In Merb, I would add a custom format to my controllers (provides xml, json, igoogle), create a custom layout (application.igoogle.erb), and ensure that all my url’s were generated and not hard coded strings (hard coding your url scheme is brittle). There may even be some templates that would benefit from being customized for small layouts (foo/index.igoogle.erb)

Does anyone know how this currently works in Rails? I’m dreading the transition back for Rails 3.