Rails Object Relationships and JSON Rendering

Question

Disclaimer, I know very little about Rails. I'll try to be succinct. Given the following model relations in Rails:

class ModelA < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :ModelB

...

class ModelB < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :ModelA

When calling the show action of the ModelA controller the returned JSON should show all ObjectAs that are children of the ObjectB of which the ObjectA in question is a child of.

So if I have an ObjectB that contains ObjectA's of ID 1, 2 and 3 and then access: /modela/1.json

I should see:

{
  "modelb": {
    "id": "1",
    "modela": [insert the ModelA JSON for ID's 1, 2 and 3]
  }
}

can you share your controller code (especially the query being performed)? — Brian
– Brian, Commented Aug 11, 2010 at 21:11
The controller is huge. The query is just @tour = Tour.find(params[:id]) — M. Ryan
– M. Ryan, Commented Aug 11, 2010 at 21:20

George Stocker · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-10 02:03:42Z

127

By default you'll only get the JSON that represents modelb in your example above. But, you can tell Rails to include the other related objects as well:

def export
  @export_data = ModelA.find(params[:id])
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.json { render :json => @export_data.to_json(:include => :modelb) }
  end
end

You can even tell it to exclude certain fields if you don't want to see them in the export:

render :json => @export_data.to_json(:include => { :modelb => { :except => [:created_at, updated_at]}})

Or, include only certain fields:

render :json => @export_data.to_json(:include => { :modelb => { :only => :name }})

And you can nest those as deeply as you need (let's say that ModelB also has_many ModelC):

render :json => @export_data.to_json(:include => { :modelb => { :include => :modelc }})

If you want to include multiple child model associations, you can do the following:

render :json => @export_data.to_json(include: [:modelA, :modelB, :modelN...])

edited Oct 10, 2016 at 2:03

George Stocker

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answered Aug 11, 2010 at 21:53

Rob Cameron

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4 Comments

Automatico Over a year ago

If you want more than one include you add the as an array: @whatever.to_json(include: [:modelA, :modelB, :modelN...]).

Scalahansolo Over a year ago

If I wanted to call this export function within a view to pull attributes from a specific model, how would I call this?

Piccolo Over a year ago

And what would be the approach, if only ModelA width ID=2 should be included? Is there any other filtering method?

user3803848 Jan 29 at 2:47

I've been struggling on this for hours... @users = User.includes(:type).all render json: @users doesn't work (even in console I don't see the Type, only type_id ...) @users = User.all render json: @users.to_json(:include => :type) works @users = User.includes(:type).all render json: @users.to_json(:include => :type) doesn't work ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I think I'll stay on Laravel, I've read the Rails manifesto and this is an exemple of what they claim to avoid.

Châu Hồng Lĩnh · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-01 19:05:56Z

3

If you want a more flexible approach to rendering json, you can consider using the gem jbuilder: https://github.com/rails/jbuilder

It allows you to render custom attributes, instance variables, associations, reuse json partials in a convenient way.

answered Jun 1, 2016 at 19:05

Châu Hồng Lĩnh

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