Render Grape API to string from a view

Question

I have Grape based API set up in a Rails 4 app. I want to render the json produced by one of the API calls into a view in an inline tag - specifically to make JSON data available to an angularjs view to avoid a (JSON API) call to server after page load.

Any ideas how to get a Grape API rendered to string?

/app/api/api.rb

class API < Grape::API
  version 'v1', using: :path
  format :json
  get '/dashboard' do
    ...
  end
end

views/dashboard/index.html.erb

<script>   
  <%= render some-way-to-render-to-text('/api/v1/dashboard.json') %>
</script>

I could use a get http request to get it rendered, but I am hoping to avoid the overhead of the http call. I rather call the API class directly.

Answer 1

Your erb file gets rendered into raw html before it gets sent to the client. Your api call is made after this, so there's no way of receiving an http response and processing it in ruby, because by this point all of the ruby has been translated into html.

What you want to do is process it in angular. From there you could use jquery to insert it into the DOM.

In angular you would do something like the following in the service:

$http.get(....).success(//insert into DOM here)