Action Text with Rails API only application

Modern web application may have a requirement to use rich text editor for a features. When a question arises to use rich text editor, Action Text is my goto option because it is packed and loaded with all lot of features makes rich text content management very easy. Following are some features which are not very highlighted in the Rails documentation:

• Handles and processes inline attachments.
• Direct upload of attachments after processing.
• Generates Preview images for video, PDFs files.
• Control over the rich text content rendered in editor.
• Sanitizes HTML.

The list is long enough to make me comfortable to choose Action Text.

Problem Statement

Action Text does not work well with Rails API only application. I have noticed some similar concerns raised on appropriate channels asking help regarding Action Text with API application.

• ActionText Not Working With API Only Setup
• How to implement ActionText with Rails 6 API and React

Why? 🤔

Action Text having a dependency on Action View to render the content and since Rails API only application would not ship with views Action Text would not work.

Solution 🎉

Here is my attempt to solve the problem within Rails by introducing Action Text for API only application. Until the change is accepted or rejected we can follow these steps to use Action Text with API only application.

1. Action Text Model

Normally, running rails action_text:install should do the trick but since Action Text installer would try to install NPM dependencies, add imports statements, etc which are not necessary in the API only application. We can ignore running Action Text installer and get migration by running following command:

./bin/rails action_text:install:migrations

2. Action Text API response

API response should return Action Text Trix HTML.

json.title post.title
json.content post.content.to_trix_html

Web application which consumes the output of the Action Text rich text content probably should use Trix editor at frontend. If you are using some other editors you would lose some benefits of using Trix editor with Action Text but you’ll be fine without Trix as well. Change the API response to render to_html instead of to_trix_html.

json.title post.title
json.content post.content.body.to_html

Another Easy Way(NOT recommend) 🎉

Another easiest way to use Action Text in API only application is inherit controller from ApplicationController instead of ActionController::API. This would also need to include Action Text blob views which are copied with Action Text installer is ran. I would NOT recommend solving it this way.

Happy Coding!!