Question

I’m trying my hand at making a rest full ruby service. The way my program is broken down is 2 applications. One is a web service spider and the other is a web app (yet to be developed) The web app will make requests to the crawler using get post and the usual stuff.

Heres a sample post request using curl\

curl -d 'url=www.whatever.com&depth=10' http://127.0.0.1:8080/requests/new

works fine and seems to post a request.

heres the delete

curl -x DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8080/requests/1      where 1 is id of request.

My question is how do i make it so that If someone does a get reqeust (namely my web app) I can get the spider to respond in JSON

I’m assuming I need to format the @request variable to JSON and then have it be the response but I haven’t the foggiest how to go about this.

Also on a side note: is the curl get request modeled in the same way.

On another side note: is there any way to tag code in stack overflow instead of using the four spaces.

Answer 1

If you always want to return JSON no matter where the request comes from (browser or spider),
then simply return json data from your controller:

render :json => @object

If you want to support a spider (JSON) and a traditional web request from a browser (HTML),
use the normal respond_to (using Rails 2 example..I don’t know Rails 3 yet):

respond_to do |format|
  format.js { render :json => @object }
  format.html
end

And make sure you have the view files in the right place for the html.