[Backgroundrb-devel] Can BackgrounDrb help me?

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

On Feb 4, 2007, at 11:38 AM, Robert Jones wrote:

> I have a big report to produce from a Rails app that takes several  
> minutes to put together.  I hoped backgroundrb would be able to  
> pull together all the ActiveRecord stuff in the background then  
> throw it back to Rails for rendering.
>
> It seems, however, that I can't pass an array of ActiveRecord  
> objects from the worker back to Rails.  Do I have that right?
>
> Another possibility was to do the rendering in the worker and send  
> back a text variable.  I got erb rendering working thanks to the  
> tips from Jacob Robbins, but none of the ActionView helpers like  
> "image_tag" are recognised.  Can anyone tell me how to make that  
> happen?
>
> Any suggestions gratefully received.
>
> Robert Jones
> http://www.jonesieboy.co.uk/blog
>


Robert-

	It is best to avoid sending large objects or strings back and forth  
between rails and bdrb because whatever you send across has to be  
marshalled and unmarshalled.

	I think you would be better off if you had bdrb save the array of AR  
objects back into the database and then have drb send back an array  
of id's of those objects. Then in rails you can grab them from the db  
again and render.

	Bdrb does not have access to rails controllers or views in the  
normal way that rails does because it is not taking HTTP requests.  
You are better off having bdrb do the heavy lifting and then let  
rails do the rendering. But try to keep the objects you pass back and  
forth as small as possible.


-- Ezra Zygmuntowicz 
-- Lead Rails Evangelist
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