Question

I need to have a button to save the current web site (just like clicking on “Save as”), I created a method in the controller which works great for any external site (like http://www.google.com) but doesn’t work for the sites inside my application, I get a timeout error!. This has no explanation to me 🙁

Any clue what is the issue?

#CONTROLLER FILE
def save_current_page
  # =>  Using MECHANIZE
  agent = Mechanize.new
  page = agent.get request.referer
  send_data(page.content, :filename => "filename.txt")
end

I tried also Open URI, same problem!

#CONTROLLER FILE
def save_current_page
 # => USANDO OPEN URI
 send_data(open(request.referer).read, :filename => "filename.txt")
end

I’m using rails 3.2 and ruby 1.9, any help is appreciated, I already spent like 10 hours trying to make it work!!

Answer 1

After several hours and lots of other posts I got to a final solution:

Bricker is right in that it is not possible for rails to render more than once in a call, as taken from http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html “Can only render or redirect once per action”

The site also states “The rule is that if you do not explicitly render something at the end of a controller action, Rails will automatically look for the action_name.html.erb template in the controller’s view path and render it.”

Then, the solution that worked great for me was to tell the controller to render to a string if a download flag (download=true) was set in :params (I also use request.url to have it working from any view in my application)

View:

= link_to 'Download', request.url+"&downloadexcel=true", :class => 'btn btn-primary btn-block'

Controller:

def acontrolleraction
  #some controller code here
  if params[:downloadexcel]
    save_page_xls
  else
    # render normally
  end
end


def save_page_xls
  #TRESCLOUD - we create a proper name for the file
  path = URI(request.referer).path.gsub(/[^0-9a-z]/i, '')
  query = URI(request.referer).query.gsub(/[^0-9a-z]/i, '')
  filename = @project_data['NOMBRE']+"_"+path+"_"+query+".xls"

  #TRESCLOUD - we render the page into a variable and process it
  page = render_to_string

  #TRESCLOUD - we send the file for download!
  send_data(page, :filename => filename, :type => "application/xls")
end

Thanks for your tips!