Add #to_hash conversion protocol to object serializer

[iamvery]

Problem

In order to use a serializer with Rails, you have to explicitly call serialize_hash, e.g.

render json: WidgetSerializer.new(widget).serialized_hash

Solution

While not a big problem at all, Rails does use the to_hash protocol under the hood in it's as_json core extension to Object. By implementing this interface you can conveniently pass a serializer instance directly to Rails' render method.

render json: WidgetSerializer.new(widget)

This may have already been considered and explicitly omitted from the library, but I didn't see any past issues mentioning it, so I thought I'd propose the change 🙂

I'm happy to discuss more and make changes as needed. I considered adding a test, but it seemed relatively low value, and I wasn't sure of the ideal location for such a test. Thanks for the wonderfully useful little library! ❤️💛💚💙

[guilleiguaran]

Agree with this!!1

btw, I'm preparing a proposal to have a better integration with ActionController, this will allow using:

render @widget

and/or:

render jsonapi: @widget

I'll open an issue with the details of my proposal later today.

[guilleiguaran]

@iamvery can you rebase this against dev branch?

right now this has some extra commits

[iamvery]

You bet! Sorry I didn't realize the project used a dev branch 😇

[shishirmk]

@iamvery thank you very much for rebasing

[iamvery]

You bet! Glad you found it useful 💫

[corinnekunze]

@shishirmk Any timeline on a release with this fix soon? This will help folks that want to use as_json on their serializer to get a json hash instead of a serialized json string. Like:

MovieSerializer.new(movie).as_json

This is common for passing data into React/Rails components. Then we don't have to bother with serializing/deserializing.