I'm looking to have a model that gets created / updated via AJAX. How do you do this in Ruby on Rails?
Also, more specifically: how do you output JSON in RoR?
def create
response = {:success => false}
@source = Source.new(params[:source])
if @source.save
response.success = true
end
render :json => response.to_json
end
All you need to do is call render :json with an object, like so:
render :json => my_object
For most objects, this will just work. If it's an ActiveRecord object, make sure to look at as_json to see how that works. For your case illustrated above, your hash will be transformed to json and returned.
However, you do have an error: you cant access the success key via response.success -- you should instead do response[:success]
jimothy's solution is really good butI believe it isn't scalable in the long term. Rails is meant to be a model, view, and controller framework. Right now JSON is cheated out of a view in default rails. However there's a great project called RABL which allows JSON view. I've written up some arguments for why I think it's a good option and how to get up and running with it quickly. See if this is useful for you: http://blog.dcxn.com/2011/06/22/rails-json-templates-through-rabl/
@source = Source.new(params[:source])
respond_to do | f |
f.html {
# do stuff to populate your html view
# maybe nothing at all because @source is set
}
f.any(:xml, :json) {
render request.format.to_sym => @source
}
end
