Jeremy Durham

If you’ve ever worked with ActiveResource then you know how much of an unfinished product it feels like. I’ve recently been interfacing with some RESTful web services, and also building some internal web services.

I chose JSON because of my need to send serialized arrays to another Rails app as well as the obvious performance over using REXML; I was surprised to find that Rails 2.3.5 broke ActiveResource, and I couldn’t readily find a patch to fix the issue.

Here’s a simple “extension” I wrote today that seems to work:

module ActiveResource

  class Base

    def encode(options={})

      case self.class.format

        when ActiveResource::Formats[:xml]

          self.class.format.encode(attributes, {:root => self.class.element_name}.merge(options))

        else

          self.class.format.encode({ self.class.element_name => attributes })

      end

    end

  end

  module Formats

    module JsonFormat      

      def decode(json)

        data = ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(json)

        if data.is_a?(Hash)

          data

        else

          data.flatten.inject([]) do |total, item|

            total << item.values.first

          end

        end

      end

    end

  end

end

Just drop this in a file (I called mine active_resource_extension.rb) and require it via require ‘active_resource_extension’. Hope that helps someone!