How to include ActionView helpers in the assets pipeline?

Question

How to include Rails view helpers to be accesible by assets pipeline execution context?

An example use case would be to generate the markup for a form, using form_tag helper method, and make it available to a Javascript template (like handlebars, jst, etc.).

I use handlebar_assets gem, but this should apply to any erb or haml template too.

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 11 '13 at 18:19

29

Create a inititializer and include the helpers in the context of the assets like this:

Rails.application.assets.context_class.class_eval do
  include ActionView::Helpers
  include MyAppHelper
  include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
end

Taken from this sprockets issue

answered Jan 11 '13 at 18:19

brutuscat

3,139
2
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33

This also worked for me when I wanted to render a custom ERB to string with `template = ERB.new(html) template.result(binding)`. Without this I wasn't able to use concat and other simple helpers. – benathon Jun 04 '13 at 09:35
@brutuscat, can you clarify where you would put this code? Thanks – jackerman09 Nov 08 '13 at 02:17
2

@jackerman09 no problem: "Create a inititializer", see more here http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#using-initializer-files – brutuscat Nov 08 '13 at 22:10
reference: https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails/issues/307#issuecomment-170707886 – bhaibel Jan 11 '16 at 23:04

score 15 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 26 '16 at 20:59

15

The above answer is now out of date. As of sprockets-rails 3, the appropriate interface is a configure block, like so:

Rails.application.config.assets.configure do |env|
  env.context_class.class_eval do
    # include SomeHelper
  end
end

This configure block should still be placed in an initializer.

reference: https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails/issues/307#issuecomment-170707886

edited Feb 26 '16 at 20:59

Gary Hepting

3
1

answered Jan 11 '16 at 23:09

bhaibel

393
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How to include ActionView helpers in the assets pipeline?

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