Rails: how to treat alternative Accept: content-types as JSON?

Question

So far I've found two ways for request.format.json? to be true in Rails (i.e. where the incoming request is treated as JSON). One is if you request a resource and ending in .json the other is if you supply the header Accept: application/json in your request. Each work stand-alone.

I want to register my own "accepts" type for this second case:

Accept: application/vnd.myapp_v1+json and have this treated by rails as a "json request" like application/json, without the need to append .json.

My first thought was to register my own MimeType as :json (within my initialisation code), but this will actually break support for application/json, not what I want to do.

    Mime::Type.register "application/vnd.myapp_v1+json", :json  # my failed attempt

Answer 1

We move iPhone requests over to HTML in our app with a before_filter like so:

before_filter :determine_format

def determine_format
    request.format = :iphone if (request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] =~ /iPhone/ && request.format == :html)
end

I imagine you can do something similar with your specific format, maybe like this:

def determine_format
    request.format = :json if (request.format == 'application/vnd.myapp_v1+json')
end