Question

I have a set of JSON data that has multiple levels of data. Snippet of the JSON (ignore the missing formatting please):

DATA SET A:
"interaction": {
   "author": {
      "username": "johndoe",
      "name": "John Doe"
   }
},
"gender": "male"

DATA SET B:
"interaction": {
   "author": {
      "name": "Jane Doe"
   }
},
"gender": "male"

In a single-level I can use:

if record.has_key?('gender')

and that will return a true/false value if the key is present.

If I try to seed data and the key isn’t present, it will throw an error and stop seeding.

My question: How would I check to see if the “username” key exists. Data Set B, for example, doesn’t have a username key and would throw an error, but I can’t figure out how to modify the has_key() command to check for a few levels down.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I’ve decided to work around the has_key method and used a begin/rescue/end.

begin
  @data.username = record['interaction']['author']['username']
rescue
  @data.username = nil
end