Richer Text

Ruby on Rails

This page will serve as the documentation page for using Richer Text with Ruby on Rails.

Installation

Getting started with Ruby on Rails is a matter of following the following instructions:

First up is to add the richer_text gem to your Gemfile.

  bundle add richer_text

Next you’ll need to run the generator task to add the yarn packages, copy over the migrations and assets.

  rails richer_text:install

Then run your migrations to create the tables in the database.

  rails db:migrate

Manual Importmaps Installation

If you’re using Importmaps v2+ for Ruby on Rails you’ll need to install our JS and CSS manually our installation script won’t do it for you, as the vendoring of the package doesn’t work properly at the moment.

curl -Lo ./vendor/javascript/richer-text.js https://unpkg.com/@afomera/richer-text@2.0.0-alpha.7/dist/bundle/index.module.js
curl -Lo ./app/assets/stylesheets/richer-text.css https://unpkg.com/@afomera/richer-text@2.0.0-alpha.7/dist/css/richer-text.css

Next inside of config/importmaps.rb you’ll need to pin @afomera/richer-text to the newly downloaded file

pin "@afomera/richer-text", to: "richer-text.js"

Lastly in your JS entrypoint import “@afomera/richer-text”.

import "@afomera/richer-text";

Usage

First up in your model add the has_richer_text :attribute_name to your models.

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  has_richer_text :body
end
Optionally: You can choose to store your content as JSON by passing `store_as: :json` to the has_richer_text attribute. 
has_richer_text :body, store_as: :json
Note: By using JSON seralization you get access to Custom Suggestions, Built in OEmbed support, and Richer Embeds. For more information on these check the documentation.

Next permit the body param in your controller

  params.require(:post).permit(:title, :body)

Then add the RicherText editor into your forms.

  <%= form.label :body %>
  <%= form.richer_text_area :body %>

Then you can render the content out with:

  <%= @post.body %>

That’s all! Enjoy using RicherText 🥳

JSON Serialization / Rendering

When you setup a Richer Text attribute on a model using has_richer_text :attribute_name you also have a choice of passing store_as: :json to use our JSON serializer and storage mechanism.

While JSON storage is a bit of an advanced feature you might prefer this route over storing the HTML as it can be frustrating to try and modify HTML that’s stored, however by using JSON you get access to define your own HTML visitor to define the rendering logic. This makes it a breeze to plug in View Components, Phlex or other libraries for rendering your rich content.

  has_richer_text :body, store_as: :json

This will create a RicherText::JsonText record associated to your model, and automatically passes serializer="json" to the form.richer_text_area form helper for you.

Overriding the default HTML visitor

As mentioned above, you can override the default renderer for Richer Text when using the JSON schema.

We use a visitor pattern to iterate over the JSON from our text editor.

To use it, first setup an initializer like so:

Rails.configuration.to_prepare do
  RicherText.default_renderer = HtmlVisitor.new
end

Create a file called html_visitor.rb and then inherit from the RicherText::HTMLVisitor. From there you’re free to redefine methods found in our RicherText::HTMLVisitor to your hearts content.

For example for overriding the default Callout behavior

class HtmlVisitor < RicherText::HTMLVisitor
  def visit_callout(node)
    "CALLOUT HERE: <div class='callout' data-color='#{node.color}'>#{visit_children(node).join}</div>"
  end
end