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ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3.2activeresource

Extending ActiveResource Class


Is it possible to extend an ActiveResource class unmarshalled from a response?

Example of ActiveResource request:

GET http://www.exampleservice.com/products.json

Response

[{name:'Product X', price:14.5, features:[{name:'Soft'}, {name:'Green'}, {name:'Heavy'}]}]

This response would be unmarshalled to a Product object with an array of Product::Feature objects. Is it possible to add some custom method/attributes to this Product::Feature class?


Solution

  • To answer my own question:

    I created a new module including my methods and extended each unmarshalled object of Product::Feature with it. This looks like the following:

    module FeatureExtension
      def my_method
        # do something
      end
    end
    

    Somewhere after I received a Product from ActiveResource I used the code:

    @product.features.each do |feature|
      feature.extend(FeatureExtension)
      feature.my_method # Now it is possible to call the method
    end