What's the best way of handling body formats for long text documents?

[mattiasgullstrand]

Hi! I'm planning on using Phlex to generate HTML for a pdf document. I want to be able to write a body on a format that keeps newlines and where it's possible to e.g. make single words bold without dividing up the text into different parts.

I might have missed something but my current solution involves unsafe_raw and ActionView's simple_format:

This is an example document HTML generator, which will be used as PhlexDocument.new.call to generate the HTML:

class PhlexDocument < Phlex::HTML

  def template
    render Document.new do |doc|
      doc.body do
        <<~TEXT
          It should keep

          newlines

          It can be <b>bold</b>

          The end.
        TEXT
      end
    end
  end
end

And this is my Document class:

class Document < Phlex::HTML
  include Phlex::DeferredRender
  include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper

  def template
    if @body
      unsafe_raw(
        simple_format(
          @body.call
        )
      )
    end
  end

  def body(&block)
    @body = block
  end
end

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks in advance!

[joeldrapper]

This looks reasonable to me. I wonder if simple_format has been misclassified as a “value helper” rather than an “output helper” in the SimpleFormat adapter. If simple_format is considered HTML safe (I assume it only allows safe HTML but will need to confirm this), we could make the unsafe_raw call in the adapter itself.

You may want to consider making the body an argument rather than a method. The interface could then be:

render Document.new(<<~TEXT)
  Document text here.
TEXT

You may also want to look into the phlex-markdown gem, which I created while building the phlex documentation site. This is very much still in beta and subject to change, but it’s also incredibly simple, so there’s not too much that can go wrong. You could even just copy the implementation, which is entirely in this one file.

[mattiasgullstrand]

Thanks for the really quick response! Good recommendation, thanks for that. Will also definitely check out phlex-markdown 👍