Question

When I get a JSON payload from my Rails heroku site (this is a basic simple test site made with the ‘generate scaffold’ command), I get something like this:

[
{"client":
    {"name":"Fred Flintstone",
    "id":3,
    "room":"333",
    },
{"client":
    {"name":"Wilma Flintstone",
    "id":4,
    "room":"334",
    }
}

]

I would really like to get something more KVC compliant, like this:

{"clients":
[
{"client":
    {"name":"Fred Flintstone",
    "id":3,
    "room":"333",
    },
{"client":
    {"name":"Wilma Flintstone",
    "id":4,
    "room":"334",
    }
}
]

}

Does anyone know how to do this? Is there some code on the Ruby side or on Heroku’s side that will give me this format?

Kurt

Answer 1

In the controller, instead of

render :json => @clients

do

render :json => {@clients.first.class.name.underscore.pluralize => @clients}

or

render :json => {@clients.first.class.table_name => @clients}

This doesn’t have anything to do with heroku.

You can turn on/off whether or not the resulting object will have the name of the object as a top level key using:

ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = true

But as far as I know, there is no configuration option to do what you are suggesting.

See http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Serialization/to_json

Another option, if you wish to do this in more than one controller, is to move this behavior to a helper and use that. The logic presented above will work regardless of the model in question.

ie:

def kvcize(array)
  {array.first.class.table_name => array}
end

then

render :json => kvcize(@clients)