Render from outside a controller?

[jrochkind]

Is there any way to render a ViewComponent from outside a controller action?

Say, from a background job? )

i guess you could use component.render_in(view_context). Now the problem becomes... where do you get/how do you make a view_context yourself when you don't have one? But also, I'm not sure how you'd actually get the results, so that's not the only problem.

Oh wait, there's also this weird little-known part of Rails... not sure how/if it can apply to ViewComponents. https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Renderer.html

Has anyone figured out a reasonable way to do this?

[cpjmcquillan]

There is an open issue #1106 where we have been discussing this.

[jrochkind]

Thanks!

I actually think I've gotten it to work as-is with https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Renderer.html

At least in my simple tests. I don't know if it is helpful if I mention that on #1106. Rails 6.1.

ApplicationController.render(MyViewComponent.new)

Actually seems to work. There is a problem involved if you have devise in your app -- which I think is unrelated to ViewComponent, and is a problem trying to use AppliationController.render at all with anything that might access current_user . I think it's all a devise/warden issue, that they don't play well with it.

Here's the beginning of a kind of horrifying workaround to that...

ApplicationController.renderer.
  new("warden" =>  Warden::Proxy.new({}, Warden::Manager.new({}))).
  render(MyViewComponent.new)

But the existing ApplicationController.renderer solution, which I guess was intended by Rails to solve the "render things that ordinarily need a view_context in arbitrary places" seems to work fine with ViewComponent in Rails 6.1. Maybe. Based on very very limited proof of concept testing.