Is there a way to use template rather than exposing models fully

[filvo]

Yo Man! First of all nice work you have done. Is there a way / plans for using templates for response like acts_as_api gem does. I want to use certain records and customized response, not the active records fields.

Thanks

[Sutto]

Hi filvo, thanks!

There isn't a way / plan to use templates at the moment - we purposed strip out rails built in templates. You can write custom serializers (e.g. check out activerecord serializers / write your own DelegateClass-based implementations, you simply need to define serializable_hash to return what you want) but the general top level structure is designed as part of rocket_pants (e.g. the response nesting etc).

There are plans to make this customisable, but it likely wont happen until 2.0. In the mean time, you can check #20 and #23 for some more guidance / ideas.

[joenoon]

I'm new to rocket_pants myself, and was trying to get expose to automatically use my ActiveModel::Serializer classes so I could just do expose @post instead of expose PostSerializer.new(@post, current_user). I came up with this. Not sure if its right or wrong, but seems to be working so far in an initializer. Any feedback would be great:

module RocketPants
  module Respondable
    private
    alias_method :orig_normalise_object, :normalise_object
    def normalise_object(json, options = {})
      # modified from: https://github.com/josevalim/active_model_serializers/blob/master/lib/action_controller/serialization.rb#L42
      if serializer = options.delete(:serializer) || (json.respond_to?(:active_model_serializer) && json.active_model_serializer)
        if json.respond_to?(:to_ary)
          if options[:root] != false && serializer.root != false
            # default root element for arrays is serializer's root or the controller name
            # the serializer for an Array is ActiveModel::ArraySerializer
            options[:root] ||= serializer.root || controller_name
          end
        end
        options[:scope] = serialization_scope unless options.has_key?(:scope)
        options[:url_options] = url_options
        serializer.new(json, options.merge(default_serializer_options || {}))
      else
        orig_normalise_object(json, options)
      end
    end
  end
end

ActiveModel::ArraySerializer.root = false

UPDATE:

Forgot a few details:

Gemfile:
gem "active_model_serializers", :git => "git://github.com/josevalim/active_model_serializers.git"

Controllers:

include ::ActionController::Serialization

def default_serializer_options
  { :root => false }
end

I use Mongoid, so I did:

Mongoid::Document.send :include, ActiveModel::SerializerSupport

[fabn]

@joenoon your code worked like a charm, thank you.

@Sutto joenoon code could be integrated as an addition to easily support ActiveModel::Serializer which often is enough to build json responses from models, what do you think?

[Sutto]

@fabn @joenoon Integrating it now and will release as 1.6.0 - Cheers!

[Sutto]

@fabn @joenoon @filvo Take a look at 1.6.0.rc1, it should support them now out of the box.

Just use expose and pass options as the second argument (e.g. for custom serializers).

[Sutto]

Closing this now as 1.6.* is out with it.