How do I generate XML using Rails?

Question

I need to create an XML file output like:

<data>
    <hour>0</hour>
    <count>8</count>
</data>
.
.
<data>
    <hour>23</hour>
    <count>1</count>
</data>

I wrote the following code in my controller:

for @k in (0..23)
  @data.push(Datum.new(@k,@freq[@k]));
end

class Datum  
  def initialize(hour, count)  
    @hour = hour  
    @count = count  
  end  
end

render xml:@data

But the output comes out like:

    tweet-densities-controller-data type="array">
    <tweet-densities-controller-datum type="TweetDensitiesController::Datum">#
    TweetDensitiesController::Datum:0xacbddc4></tweet-densities-controller-datum>

jessecurry · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-06 04:13:30Z

2

You may want to take a look at builder: Generating custom XML for your rails app

answered Jan 6, 2012 at 4:13

jessecurry

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Comments

Federico Builes · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-06 06:42:36Z

0

What is happening here is that when you do render :xml => @data Rails is trying to convert @data (which is an Array) to its XML representation. This is not what you want in this case.

Define a #to_xml method on your Datum class and then you can do something like:

@data.map(&:to_xml).join("\n")

Which will call the #to_xml method for every object and then you'll concatenate them, separating each entry by a newline.

If you want well-structured XML data (doesn't seem like it from your example) then you should use something like Builder as suggested by jessecurry.

answered Jan 6, 2012 at 6:42

Federico Builes

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