Question

I am trying to create a form with Sencha Touch that will create a new Task in a simple Rails 3 application. I am essentially adding nested JSON to this question.

To make testing it easy I am hardcoding the params into the request. The Rails app was created using:

$rails g scaffold task name:string

Sencha Touch Ajax request:

Ext.Ajax.request({
 url:'/tasks',
 method:'POST',
 params: { 
  task: { name: "Hello World" }
  }

Rails expects the params hash to look like this:

Parameters: { "task"=>{"name"=>"Hello World"} }

But the Ajax POST from Sencha sends it like this:

Parameters: {"task"=>"[object Object]"}

When I try using defaultHeaders like:

Ext.Ajax.defaultHeaders = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

It posts like this:

Parameters: {"_json"=>"task=%5Bobject%20Object%5D"}

Any thoughts on how to handle this properly?

Answer 1

As per http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_controller_overview.html#hash-and-array-parameters, Rails creates ‘nested’ parameters when it sees form fields using […] syntax.

Ext.Ajax.request({
    url:'/tasks',
    method:'POST',
    params: {
        'task[name]':'Hello World'
    }
});

I don’t have a Rails server to test this out against, but the POST body looks about right.