Man, I miss the old “Late Night with David Letterman” of the 80’s sometimes…

Alright, to the point. Ruby on Rails makes it extremely easy to generate nicely formed XML from your application, especially if you are simple doing something like the following:

 def show
    @topic = Topic.find(params[:id])
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.xml { render  ml => @topic.to_xml }
    end
  end

If the request is for XML version of the topic, this will take all the attributes of a topic and make them into well formed XML. Nifty, but this doesn’t provide fine-grained control of the XML output which is what I need. RXML templates to the rescue:

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