How to view the HTTP response to an ActiveResource request

Question

I am trying to debug an ActiveResource call that is not working.

How can I view the HTTP response to the request ActiveResource is making?

Answer 1

It's easy. Just look at the response that comes back. :)

Two options:

• You have the source file on your computer. Edit it. Put a puts response.inspect at the appropriate place. Remember to remove it.
• Ruby has open classes. Find the right method and redefine it to do exactly what you want, or use aliases and call chaining to do this. There's probably a method that returns the response -- grab it, print it, and then return it.

Here's a silly example of the latter option.

# Somewhere buried in ActiveResource:
class Network
  def get
    return get_request
  end

  def get_request
    "I'm a request!"
  end
end

# Somewhere in your source files:
class Network
  def print_request
    request = old_get_request
    puts request
    request
  end
  alias :old_get_request :get_request
  alias :get_request :print_request
end

Imagine the first class definition is in the ActiveRecord source files. The second class definition is in your application somewhere.

$ irb -r openclasses.rb 
>> Network.new.get
I'm a request!
=> "I'm a request!"

You can see that it prints it and then returns it. Neat, huh?

(And although my simple example doesn't use it since it isn't using Rails, check out alias_method_chain to combine your alias calls.)