= with_xml
A simple plugin for customizing the xml serialization of ActiveRecord objects.
== INSTALLATION
script/plugin install git://github.com/mattsears/with_xml.git
== EXAMPLE USAGE
In general, you can define the xml options in the model's class definition. In this example,
we'll set the xml options in the Article class:
ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version => 1) do
create_table :articles do |t|
t.string :name, :heading, :body, :author
end
end
In the Article's class, we define the xml serialization options in the <b>with_xml</b> block like so:
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
with_xml :feeds, {:alias => ["magazine", "blog", "newspaper"]} do
bind :heading, :to => ["subject", "title"]
bind :body, :to => ["content", "message", "post"]
serialize :except => [ :name ], :skip_instruct => true
end
end
With the <b>serialize</b> option, the script sets the global options for the <b>to_xml</b> calls. In the code above,
we've specified not to include the :name attribute or the xml instructions in the xml return from the <b>to_xml</b> call.
article.to_xml
...becomes...
#<article>
# <author>...</author>
# <body>...</body>
# <heading>...</heading>
#</article>
The <b>bind</b> options allows us to set the Article attributes with an xml string that has a different schema. For example, data for our Article class may come from external sources such as blogs, magazines or newspapers with different xml schemas. With the <b>bind</b> options in the code above, we can import any of the following xml documents into the Article:
article.from_xml(xml)
#<article>
# <heading>Page Six</heading>
# <body>Content for article</body>
#</article>
#<magazine>
# <title>The Washington Post</title>
# <content>This is the content</content>
#</magazine>
#<blog>
# <title>TechCrunch</title>
# <post>The Post</post>
#</blog>
#<newspaper>
# <title>The Wall Street Journal</title>
# <content>This is the content</content>
# <unknown>There is no field for this element. It will be ignored.</unknown>
# <AUTHOR>Caps will be by default</AUTHOR>
#</newspaper>
== Contact
Author:: Matt Sears
Email:: matt@mattsears.com
Home Page:: http://mattsears.com/code/with_xml/
License:: MIT Licence (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
