Question

I’m reading this Railscast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/340-datatables?view=asciicast

Mid-way down the page, Ryan says

The as_json method is triggered behind the scenes by the render_json
call in the controller.

but no more explanation is given. I’m trying to have this class respond with CSV as well, but def as_csv in the class and format.csv { render :csv => in the calling controller does nothing.

So, somehow the class knows when it was initialized by render :json, but I can’t figure out how to make it know it was initialized by render :csv. Can someone explain this?

Answer 1

If you pass an object to render :json, the as_json method is called on that object to retrieve a JSON representation of that object. You can overwrite this method so that it returns whatever you want.

This only works specifically for JSON, it’s not a general rule that can be applied to all formats. If you’d like to render a CSV representation of some object, you can do it easily enough by using something like:

format.csv do
  render :text => object.as_csv
end

and then implementing the as_csv method in the class.