Question

I have a silverlight application that needs to talk to a rails app to add a record. I have been able to get the silverlight app to successfully do the POST assuming everything goes good. Now, however, I need to be able to make it more robust and have the rails app return error/success messages to the silverlight app in a format it can read (xml maybe?). I can modify the rails app and silverlight app as needed.

What is the best way to accomplish this with rails?

Answer 1

Rails handles most of this out-of-the-box.

You need to have a look at respond_to

This will return the records in @list as XML:

@list = Model.find(:all)
respond_to do |format|           
  format.html { render :action => "index" }
  format.xml  { render :xml => @list }
end             

You can set status using http headers (for actions that don’t return anything):

format.xml  { head :ok }

And you can provide more complex messages, in this case returning Active Record errors and a status message:

format.xml  { render :xml => @model.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }