I'm making a Ruby Sinatra application that uses mongomapper and most of my responses will be in the JSON form.
Now I've come across a number of different things that have to do with JSON.
JSON
class: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/json/rdoc/JSON.htmlActiveSupport
JSON http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/JSON.html because I'm using MongoMapper which uses ActiveSupport
.I'm using a single method to handle responses:
def handleResponse(data, haml_path, haml_locals)
case true
when request.accept.include?("application/json") #JSON requested
return data.to_json
when request.accept.include?("text/html") #HTML requested
return haml(haml_path.to_sym, :locals => haml_locals, :layout => !request.xhr?)
else # Unknown/unsupported type requested
return 406 # Not acceptable
end
end
the line:
return data.to_json
works when data
is an instance of one of my MongoMapper
model classes:
class DeviceType
include MongoMapper::Document
plugin MongoMapper::Plugins::IdentityMap
connection Mongo::Connection.new($_DB_SERVER_CNC)
set_database_name $_DB_NAME
key :name, String, :required => true, :unique => true
timestamps!
end
I suspect in this case the to_json
method comes somewhere from ActiveSupport
and is further implemented in the mongomapper
framework.
I'm using the same method to handle errors too. The error class I'm using is one of my own:
# Superclass for all CRUD errors on a specific entity.
class EntityCrudError < StandardError
attr_reader :action # :create, :update, :read or :delete
attr_reader :model # Model class
attr_reader :entity # Entity on which the error occured, or an ID for which no entity was found.
def initialize(action, model, entity = nil)
@action = action
@model = model
@entity = entity
end
end
Of course, when calling to_json
on an instance of this class, it doesn't work. Not in a way that makes perfect sense: apparantly this method is actually defined. I've no clue where it would come from. From the stack trace, apparently it is activesupport
:
Unexpected error while processing request: object references itself
object references itself
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:75:in `check_for_circular_references'
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:46:in `encode'
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:246:in `block in encode_json'
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:246:in `each'
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:246:in `map'
/home/id833541/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/json/encoding.rb:246:in `encode_json'
But where is this method actually defined in my class?
I will need to override the method in my class like this:
# Superclass for all CRUD errors on a specific entity.
class EntityCrudError < StandardError
def to_json
#fields to json
end
end
But I don't know how to proceed. Given the 3 ways mentioned at the top, what's the best option for me?
As it turned out, I didn't need to do anything special.
I had not suspected this soon enough, but the problem is this:
class EntityCrudError < StandardError
..
attr_reader :model # Model class
..
end
This field contains the effective model class:
class DeviceType
..
..
end
And this let to circular references. I now replaced this with just the class name, which will do for my purposes. Now to_json
doesn't complain anymore and I'm happy too :)
I'm still wondering what's the difference between all these JSON implementations though.