Rails: Calling render() outside your Controllers

I found myself needing to render a .rxml template from my Model today (Ok, stop the MVC preach already...) anyways.. found a few deadends, but finally got down to use method_missing to see what's needed by ActionViewer::Base. Not sure if there's an easier way...

 

# 
# lib/render_anywhere.rb
# 
# Render templates outside of a controller or view.
# 
# Simply mixin this module to your existing class, for example:
# 
#   class MyTemplater < ActiveRecord::Base
#     include RenderAnywhere
# 
# And you can use render() method that works the same as ActionView::Base#render
# 
#   obj = MyTemplater.new
#   obj.html = obj.render :file => '/shared/header'
# 
# 
module RenderAnywhere
    
    class DummyController
        def logger
            RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER
        end
        def headers
            {}
        end
    end
    
    def render(options, assigns = {})
        viewer = ActionView::Base.new(Rails::Configuration.new.view_path, assigns, DummyController.new)
        viewer.render options
    end
    
    def template_exists?(path, assigns = {})
        viewer = ActionView::Base.new(Rails::Configuration.new.view_path, assigns, DummyController.new)
        viewer.pick_template_extension(path) rescue false
    end
end

Hope this is helpful to someone