Overriding the not_found template with dynamically generated HTML

[jbearden0]

About 12 years ago I created an application with mojolocious and then about 8 years ago I ran into some problems and migrated my application to just plack and bunch of custom code. I am now trying to see if I can migrate it back. One of the problems I had was with understanding the documentation, and I am still having that problem. The first issue I have run into is I am trying to replace the default Page Not Found with custom HTML. I am not using templates and I would prefer not to start. My existing code generates the HTML just fine, I just can't figure out how to make mojolicious render it. The closest I have gotten so far is adding a before_render hook thusly:

hook before_render => sub ($c, $args) {
  if ($args->{template} && $args->{template} eq 'not_found') {
    return unless $c->accepts('html');
    $args->{text} = {'MY AWESOME HTML'};
  }
};

That results in just a hash being displayed instead of a full on exception. Can anybody please tell me how to make mojolicious return my awesome HTML when a page isn't found? Bonus points for pointing towards some documentation that explains how to do it, because I looked and I couldn't find it.

[rabbiveesh]

have you read the various guides? It looks like you found the docs here https://docs.mojolicious.org/Mojolicious/Guides/Rendering#Rendering-exception-and-not_found-pages

Why can't you just use a template which is plain html?

Even if you can't do that, did you click the next link to see https://docs.mojolicious.org/Mojolicious#before_render which states that $args gets passed to the renderer, so you could do something like $args->{text} = $literally_the_html_you_produced. The text renderer sends it down as HTML.

What exactly do you find difficult about the docs? i find them INCREDIBLY clear and very concise and consistent.

[jbearden0]

Thank you for the reply! Yes, I am working my way through the guides but a lot of it does not apply to my use case. My application pulls GUI metadata (info on permissions, pages, tabs, section, buttons, fields. etc) from the database and generates all the content dynamically in both HTML and JSON, so I use no templates. I can update some tables in the database and add a completely new form with logic without editing a file, rolling out a new version (although I usually have to due this because of unique logic code), running a utility, or restarting the server. And it's all custom code.

Basically right now I am trying to get my application back to using the core features of mojolicious like hypnotoad, session management, serving static files, etc. The plan is to work more mojo in back over time like store, stash, minion (which didn't exist 8 years ago so I used gearman) but I currently don't have plans to start using templates because they would be too limiting. My app (a medical records system) is currently over 75000 lines of perl code and it's mission critical for a lot of people, so I am taking this slowly and testing the crap out of it.

I respectfully disagree about the docs. I read a lot of docs and it may just be me but I can't just grok them. In my opinion compared to other documentation there is a lot of "This is the fooswah button, when you click it fooswah happens" and "This API is so simple we don't need to talk a lot about the concepts behind it" going on. The main mojolicious documentation is great if you already understand basic mojolicious concepts and you just need to reference the API or something, but I find myself having to google other sources like stack overflow because I don't understand basic mojolicious concepts and never did. I pretty much need to see example code to really understand something, and I don't think there is a lot of that in the documentation. Another reason may be that I am not starting out from scratch with my project and I'm trying to do things with mojolicious that isn't common.

[freste]

Why
$args->{text} = {'MY AWESOME HTML'};
did you mean:
$args->{text} = 'MY AWESOME HTML';

[jbearden0]

Oh my gosh, thank you. I was trying so many different things I missed that.