Typically when I go to generate some XML-style documents in Ruby on Rails I manually code the XML syntax and manually escape and substitute the strings where I want them. This technique is pretty sloppy in to toss in a view, and relies on your ability to generate well-formed XML off the top of your head. (Its usually the escaping that becomes an issue.)

Thinking back, this the probably the quick and easy technique I picked up from my PHP development projects.  I could hand-code and debug some XML faster than I could find a suitable library, install it, and figure out how to work it.  Sometimes it’s just easier to do things the hard way.

As a rule of thumb, I think the hard way in PHP never translates well into Ruby on Rails.

Yesterday I was struggling to cleanly generate XML in Rails 3 because of the new default sanitation.   Using Builder was easy enough to generate the right XML structure for my KML file, but getting it to output was a challenge.  All of my < tags were getting replaced with < and such, and the raw parameter (<%=raw foo %>) wasn’t cooperating.

I ended up discovering that I could rename my file from show.kml.erb to show.kml.builder, and I wouldn’t have to mess around with any escaping or erb syntax at all. You can check out the code I used in this commit.  It might be just me, but I always struggle to find the appropriate documentation for these little nuances in Rails.  There is tons of code showing how to use Builder to build XML documents, but not one of them mentioned what to name your file.

This technique definitely took me longer than a quick pass through manually plugging in the string would have, but its a lot cleaner.  I don’t have to worry about escaping or generating valid XML, and if performance is an issue I can install a new XML builder to speed things up.