My application scrapes information from various sites using Mechanize. Naturally, each site requires custom Mechanize code. Each site is stored in my database, including the url to scrape and the string name of an .rb file containing that site's Mechanize code. For this case, let's assume the scripts are available in the assets folder.
I would like to call http://example.com/site/:id
, then have the show action dynamically choose which Mechanize script to run (say, @site.name + ".rb"
). The script will massage the data into a common model, so all sites can use the same show template.
I can't find a way to dynamically load a .rb script within an action and obtain the result. It may be easier to have the scripts return a JSON string, which I can parse before passing on to the template, but I can't see a solution for that either. Ideally, the script will run in the action's scope. The ugly solution is an enormous if-else chain (testing the site name to determine which code block to run), but there must be a better way.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as would any general solutions to running different code dependent upon the properties of database objects.