Action Pack components in Rails

Question

I'm a Rails beginner and reading RailsGuides.

In RailsGuides, it says:

Action View and Action Controller are the two major components of Action Pack.
- RailsGuides Action View Overview

and in Action Pack section of Rails on GitHub, it says, Action Pack consists of Action Dispatch and Action Controller components.

My questions is, what are the Action Pack components in fact?

Answer 1

ActionPack is a bundled with ActionController and ActionView. While processing any request, behind the scene both action view and action controller play a big role in processing the request. However, the ActiveRecord and ActionPack both are a different set of components. As @Leandro mentioned both the view and controller layer put together as a one single component as ActionPack.

ActionPack = ActionController + ActionView

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I noticed the same discrepancy. It appears the Rails Guide is incorrect. ActionView is not part of ActionPack.

ActionPack is a gem bundled with Rails that consists of the Action_dispatch and Action_controller modules. ActionView is a separate gem also bundled with Rails. Each has it's own Github repository https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actionpack and https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actionview.

If you look at a gemfile.lock on any Rails project, you'll see under Rails there are separate modules for actionpack and actionview. You can also look within your actual gem files on your computer and you'll see a folder for actionpack-4.x.x (within that there will be a lib/action_controller folder and lib/action_dispatch folder) and a folder for actionview-4.x.x.

Answer 3

Good question...

In Rails, the Controller and View layers are handled together by Action Pack. These two layers are bundled in a single package due to their heavy interdependence. This is unlike the relationship between Active Record and Action Pack, which are independent. Each of these packages can be used independently outside of Rails.

I suggest you clone the project gitihub and open their classes as collateral..

Hope this helps