Customize ViewComponentsController

[23tux]

I'd like to customize the controller used for previews, but setting a controller like it is mentioned in the readme doesn't work:

Component tests and previews assume the existence of an ApplicationController class, which be can be configured using the test_controller option:
https://github.com/github/view_component#configuring-testcontroller

config.view_component.test_controller = "PreviewController"

Is the config.view_component.test_controller only for tests and not for previews?

Background is: My desired layout needs some controller logic and before filters (like authorization) and I'd like to display them in a different style.

[joelhawksley]

@juanmanuelramallo can you provide some context here? Perhaps we should clarify this behavior in the README.

[juanmanuelramallo]

I don't think we've ever used the test_controller in the previews, so definitely we should clarify it in the README.

[joelhawksley]

Thought so. Mind updating it?

[juanmanuelramallo]

Is the config.view_component.test_controller only for tests and not for previews?

Yes, only for tests. We should update the readme to state that.

Background is: My desired layout needs some controller logic and before filters (like authorization) and I'd like to display them in a different style.

Can you try overriding the controller and just adding the before actions you need?

For the different style in the index and examples view I guess you would need to call ViewComponentsController#prepend_application_view_paths from inside your overridden controller, so that you can use your own views to update the style as you want.

[23tux]

thanks for the answer! Is there something planned besides just overriding the controller? IMO it's a monkey patch that I'd like to avoid. Providing the controller class for the preview would be perfect. You'd have to implement the loading of the available components yourself, but I think this could be extracted in a helper from the ViewComponentsController.

Any ideas on how to implement this? If you could provide some guidance, I'm happy to try for a PR.

[23tux]

or is there a way to disable the whole preview feature?

[juanmanuelramallo]

You can set config.view_component.show_previews to be false https://github.com/github/view_component/blob/master/lib/view_component/previewable.rb#L19 to disable the whole preview feature.

Implementing a configuration to allow a custom preview controller would be nice. More than happy to give a hand on the topic if you want to implement it. I guess we should start by adding the configuration option in our previewable module, then extracting the reusable bits of the view components controller we currently have, and documenting it. I'm thinking out loud, I'm not entirely sure the specific details of this.

[jonspalmer]

I was surprised to find that it works but I learned this useful trick from Devise: https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/master/app/controllers/devise_controller.rb#L4

What that would allow is to configure the parent class of ViewComponentsController. That might be enough for your use case and would be very simple to do with a new Config option that defaults to "Rails::ApplicationController"