Shuo Feng

Shuo Feng

Software Engineer

Serializing and JSON API resources in Rails

4 minute read

Serializing, resources in rails

The goal of this article is to understand how to use active_model_serializers and JSONAPI::Resources and the reason why we should use them.

Create an api only rails app

What I want to achieve is to use rails as backend talks to frontend via api, that means the rails app should be api only, and since rails already have render :json out of the box, let’s get the first version of the app working: (I use postgres you don’t have to keep the postgres related part)

rails new my-app --api --database=postgresql

You will find the app code generate with this setup is lighter, some directories you see won’t be there anymore, such as app/assets/, lib/assets/, app/views/layouts/application.hmtl.erb and some gems related to the view part are not installed, such as sass-rails, coffee-rails, the app/controller/application_controller.rb looks a little different too, since it is now inheriting from ActionController::API instead of ActionController::Base,also the line protect_from_forgery with: :exception is gone too. (see a more comprehensive list here)

Since the backend and frontend are separate, we will need to enable CORS:

In the Gemfile, uncomment gem 'rack-cors' , create a new file config/initializers/cors.rb, it should like this:

Rails.application.config.middleware.insert_before 0, "Rack::Cors" do
  allow do
    origins '*'
    resource '*',
      headers: :any,
      methods: %i(get post put patch delete options head)
  end
end

Now let’s create some models as a simple example:

# one user has many pets
rails g User name:string age:integer
rails g Pet name:string fav_food:string user:references
# or rails g Pet name:string fav_food:string user_id:integer

update the model files

class User < ApplicationRecord
	has_many :pets
end

class Pet < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
end

generate the controller without view assets (note the plural)

rails g controller Users --skip-assets
rails g controller Pets --skip-assets

Then modify the controller, for this simple example we will just use GET request, update the router:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :pets, only: [:index, :show]
  resources :users, only: [:index, :show]
end

# pets_controller
class PetsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render json: Pet.all
  end

  def show
    render json: Pet.find(params[:id])
  end
end

# users_controller
class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render json: User.all
  end

  def show
    render json: User.find(params[:id])
  end
end

Let’s create some dummy data in rails console after rake db:migrate:

a = Person.create({name: "aaa", age: 23})
b = Person.create({name: "bbb", age: 25})
a.cats.create({name: "Fluffles", fav_food: "friskies"})
a.cats.create({name: "Spot", fav_food: "salmon"})
a.cats.create({name: "Furtha",fav_food: "chicken"})
b.cats.create({name: "Meowserino", fav_food: "Garbanzo Beans"})
b.cats.create({name: "Boomer", fav_food: "beef"})
b.cats.create({name: "Mr. Whiskers", fav_food: "Gouda Cheese"})

Now run the rails server and make request to /users or /pets api, you should see all attributes are included in the response, including create_at and update_at, But we want more control over the response, for instance, we don’t need to show those timestamp to front end.

active model serializers

To get better control of the response, we will install gem 'active_model_serializers' then use the generator: rails g serializer pet this will generate a new directory app/serializer

class PetSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :id, :name, :fav_food
  # the attributes here are the whitelist of the response
end

# add relationship
class PetSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :id, :name, :fav_food, :user
  # it will display all user info as well, which is redundant
end

But usually we only need the id of the user in the pet response, we can enhance it with custom functions like this:

class CatSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :id, :name, :owner
  def owner
    {owner_id: self.object.person.id}
  end
end

There are more ways to add control, such as to make an attribute conditional:

attribute :private_data, if: :is_current_user?
attribute :another_private_data, if: -> { scope.admin? }

def is_current_user?
  object.id == current_user.id
end

You can also use a different adapters such as JSON api.

JSONAPI::Resources

You might be thinking active model serializer seems to be good enough, but if you consider the JSON API spec, active model serializer(AMS) might not be enough, according to the creator of the JSONAPI::Resources, even though AMS has support for JSON API spec with the adapter, its focus is serializers not resources.

The primary reason we developed JR is that AMS is focused on serializers and not resources. While serializers are just concerned with the representation of a model, resources can also act as a proxy to a backing model. In this way, JR can assist with fetching and modifying resources, and can therefore handle all aspects of JSON API.

let’s see how it works after adding gem 'jsonapi-resources' and bundle:

first include the module in controller, it could be in the ApplicationController or under namespace such as:

module Web
  class SupportsController < ApplicationController
    include JSONAPI::ActsAsResourceController
  end
end

some config update in config/environments/development.rb

config.eager_load = true
config.consider_all_requests_local       = false

Create models and relationships similar to the pet and user example.

Create controllers:

rails g controller Contacts --skip-assets
rails g controller PhoneNumbers --skip-assets

Now create app/resources directory, make resource file for each model in a standard way such as phone_number_resource.rb, user_resource.rb

class ContactResource < JSONAPI::Resource
  attributes :name_first, :name_last, :email, :twitter
  has_many :phone_numbers
end

class PhoneNumberResource < JSONAPI::Resource
  attributes :name, :phone_number
  has_one :contact

  filter :contact
end

The add this in routes.rb:

jsonapi_resources :contacts
jsonapi_resources :phone_numbers

Now you can create new contact or phone numbers with POST request, then make GET request you should see something like this:

{
    "data": [
        {
            "id": "1",
            "type": "phone-numbers",
            "links": {
                "self": "http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1"
            },
            "attributes": {
                "name": "home",
                "phone-number": "(603) 555-1212"
            },
            "relationships": {
                "contact": {
                    "links": {
                        "self": "http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1/relationships/contact",
                        "related": "http://localhost:3000/phone-numbers/1/contact"
                    }
                }
            }
        },
				......
    ]
}

And because we have filter in phone number resources, an API request like this [localhost:7070/phone-numbers?filter[contact]=1](http://localhost:7070/phone-numbers?filter[contact]=1) would return phone numbers belongs to contact id=1.

You can also get context that is available in controller, for instance:

class ApplicationController < JSONAPI::ResourceController
  def context
    {current_user: current_user}
  end
end

And you can specify get the underlying model with @model. You can also specify which attribute is fetchable or updatable, set up filter, pagination, and custom links.

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