Question

I am trying to debug an ActiveResource call that is not working.

What’s the best way to view the HTTP response to the request ActiveResource is making?

Answer 1

It’s easy. Just look at the response that comes back. 🙂

Two options:

• You have the source file on your computer. Edit it. Put a puts response.inspect at the appropriate place. Remember to remove it.
• Ruby has open classes. Find the right method and redefine it to do exactly what you want, or use aliases and call chaining to do this. There’s probably a method that returns the response — grab it, print it, and then return it.

Here’s a silly example of the latter option.

# Somewhere buried in ActiveResource: class Network   def get     return get_request   end    def get_request     'I'm a request!'   end end  # Somewhere in your source files: class Network   def print_request     request = old_get_request     puts request     request   end   alias :old_get_request :get_request   alias :get_request :print_request end 

Imagine the first class definition is in the ActiveRecord source files. The second class definition is in your application somewhere.

$ irb -r openclasses.rb  >> Network.new.get I'm a request! => 'I'm a request!' 

You can see that it prints it and then returns it. Neat, huh?

(And although my simple example doesn’t use it since it isn’t using Rails, check out alias_method_chain to combine your alias calls.)