Question

Having a weird issue with Rails 3.2.1. Working with a legacy database with icky column names and I’m trying to clean them up in my model. The following model works fine in HTML, but responding with JSON or XML throws a stack level too deep error:

class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
    set_table_name 'ordersum'
    set_primary_key 'ordernbr'

    alias_attribute 'id','ordernbr'
    alias_attribute 'customer_id', 'custid'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_name', 'sname'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_company','scompany'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_address1','saddress1'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_address2','saddress2'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_city','scity'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_state','sstate'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_zip','zip'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_country','scountry'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_phone','sphone'
    alias_attribute 'shipping_method','shipvia'
    alias_attribute 'subtotal','product'
    alias_attribute 'shipping', 'freight'
    alias_attribute 'handling', 'handling'
    alias_attribute 'total', 'ordertot'
    alias_attribute 'transaction_id', 'vsTransactionId'
    alias_attribute 'reference_number', 'vsrefnbr'
    alias_attribute 'approval_code', 'vsappcode'
    alias_attribute 'created_on', 'entereddtm'
end

class OrdersController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :html, :xml, :json

  def index
    @orders = Order.all
    respond_with @orders
  end
end

Order is stack level too deep with no stack trace.

Edit #1 Framework/Full trace had 1 item:

actionpack (3.2.1) lib/action_dispatch/middleware/reloader.rb:70

Edit #2 Found some additional details after digging. Did a rails console and an Order.find and got the error below. Please note that Order.allworks fine.

C:\Users\Rich\App>rails console
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.1)
irb(main):001:0> Order.find(1)
  ←[1m←[36mOrder Load (1.0ms)←[0m  ←[1mSELECT `ordersum`.* FROM `ordersum` WHERE `ordersum`.`ordernbr` = 1 LIMIT 1←[0m
SystemStackError: stack level too deep
        from C:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.9.1/logger.rb:443
irb(main):002:0>

Answer 1

Did you mean to alias handling to itself?

alias_attribute 'handling', 'handling'

That’ll blow your stack right up.