Monday, November 17, 2008

Bug in Haml Partial Rendering?

I have stumbled across what I think is a bug in rendering a Haml partial in Ruby on Rails. The issue is that when I use render(:partial => '...', :locals => {...}), and one of the locals I define is a Boolean, it seems that if I pass a value of false, that value erroneously gets converted to nil. This causes a problem with a partial that wants to treat false, true, and nil as meaning different things.

Consider the following example:

I have a simple TestController:

class TestController < ApplicationController
def index
end
end


Then, the haml template for that controller:

!!!
%html
%head
%title haml partial test
%body
%b Rendering a Haml Partial
%br
= render :partial => 'test_haml', :locals => {:flag1 => true, :flag2 => false}

%hr
%b Rendering an RHTML Partial
%br
= render :partial => 'test_rhtml', :locals => {:flag1 => true, :flag2 => false}


Notice that partial renders two partials. One is a haml partial, one is an rhtml partial. The rthml one behaves as I would expect, the haml one does not.

Here is what the haml partial looks like:

- if flag1 == false
flag1 is false
- elsif flag1 == true
flag1 is true
- elsif flag1 == nil
flag1 is nil
- else
= "flag1 is #{flag1.inspect}"

%br
%br

- if flag2 == false
flag2 is false
- elsif flag2 == true
flag2 is true
- elsif flag2 == nil
flag2 is nil
- else
= "flag2 is #{flag2.inspect}"


Here is what the rhtml partial looks like:

<% if flag1 == false %>
flag1 is false
<% elsif flag1 == true %>
flag1 is true
<% elsif flag1 == nil %>
flag1 is nil
<% else %>
flag1 is <%= flag1.inspect %>
<% end %>






<% if flag2 == false %>
flag2 is false
<% elsif flag2 == true %>
flag2 is true
<% elsif flag2 == nil %>
flag2 is nil
<% else %>
flag2 is <%= flag2.inspect %>
<% end %>


Here is what the output looks like:



Notice the discrepancy between the output of the haml partial versus the rhtml partial, with respect to flag2.

This is gonna turn out to be a real drag on a project that I am converting from rhtml to haml that has a number of partials that assume that false means false and not nil.

Anybody out there have any thoughts on this?

2 comments:

Natalie said...

This is fixed in r8f85cfd.

scottwb said...

Awesome. Thanks Nathan!