Question

I have two objects, an @article and a @profile. Article is a model and @profile is a Struct. I’d like to end up with some JSON that looks like this:

{
    "article": {
        "title": "this is a title",
        "author": "Author McAuthor",
        "profile": {
            "first_name": "Bobby",
            "last_name": "Fisher"
        }
    }
}

As of now, I can just manually create this by doing something like:

@json = { article: { title: @article.title, author: @article.author, profile: { first_name: @profile.first_name, last_name: @profile.last_name } }}

I feel like building the json object this way is sorta crude, also, every time I change the author model, I might have to change this code. It would be great if I could find an easier way to build these json objects without having to do so manually… Any help? Thanks!

Answer 1

In addition to shioyama’s correct answer, you can use rabl to craft your JSON objects, similar to how ERB works for views.

For example, you would create a ‘view’, say, index.rabl. It would look like:

collection @articles
attributes :author, :title
child(:profile) { attributes :first_name, :last_name }