Rails PDF Plugin Error Pages
I needed to generate PDFs for the OBRA website, so I installed the Rails PDF plugin and Ruby PDF::Writer.
I’m happy with both. Typical for Ruby and Rails, they “just work” and my code is terse and expressive. (Well, the Rails plugin source code is a bit rough, and there are no unit tests. And the PDF::Writer API is a bit of a head-scratcher, but I blame Adobe for that.)
One minor annoyance is that Rails returns PDF page (.rpdf) errors as “application/pdf” content with names like mypage.pdf.html. Safari, at least, just saves the page to the desktop.
I improved this by overriding a couple methods in my ActionController:
def rescue_action_in_public(exception)
headers.delete("Content-Disposition")
super
end
def rescue_action_locally(exception)
headers.delete("Content-Disposition")
super
end
And now I get my errors in the browser, where I like them.
