Question

I had a Menu model, that has submenus of same type. Something like:

• level 1
  • level 1.1
  • level 1.2
• level 2
  • level 2.1
  • …

So, I need a way to include in my json, all levels, in a recursive way.

Answer 1

JSON in Rails works through two methods:

as_json is responsible for creating a hash representation of the object whereas to_json converts that hash object representation to JSON.

So what you need to do is define the as_json method in your model to include what you want.

def as_json
 {
   :other_options => value,
   :submenu => self.submenus.collect { |n| n.as_json }
 }
end

This is a very crude implementation, but it will recursively visit all submenus (as submenus are menus themselves) and render them to a Hash that then gets translated to JSON.