Question

I’m having a bit of a problem. I want posts to be the default resource when navigating to my site (it’s a blog:)

www.example.com/ #=> posts#index

www.example.com/15 #=> posts#show

etc. However, I want to be able to open up an API that I can use on my portfolio. I can use the respond_to format.json block to allow this:

www.example.com/15.json

but I can’t figure out how to output the index action as json. Here are my current routes:

resources :posts, :path => ''

How would I access the index action with a JSON extension? Sorry If that didn’t make any sense.

Answer 1

You mean: how to write an url in your browser’s address bar to get index as JSON?

Just keep your root index path to posts#index but allow API calls to /posts/all.json (you must code the all action yourself, of course) – you can also use additional subdomain api.example.com for your API calls and return only JSON formatted output for them, like here Dailymile is doing.

Also:
I think it’s better for an API to have a clue word like /posts/<what I want from posts> instead of a blank index / – old, good saying that good function name is the best function documentation.