RABL

RABL is a ruby templating system for Rails that takes a different approach for generating JSON and other formats. Rather than using the ActiveRecord 'to_json', I generally find myself wanting to use a more expressive and flexible system for generating my Public APIs. This is especially true when I the json doesn't match to the exact schema defined in the database.

There were a few things in particular I wanted to do easily:

• Create arbitrary nodes named based on combining data in the object
• Include nodes only if a condition is met
• Pass arguments to methods and store the result as a node
• Include partial templates to reduce code duplication
• Easily rename attributes from their name in the model

This general templating system solves all of those problems.

Installation

gem install rabl

Usage

Basic usage of the templater:

# app/views/users/show.json.rabl
attributes :id, :foo, :bar

This will generate a json response with the attributes specified. You can also include arbitrary code:

# app/views/users/show.json.rabl
code :full_name do |u|
  u.first_name + " " + u.last_name
end

You can also add children nodes:

child @posts => :foobar do
  attributes :id, :title
end

or use existing model associations:

child :posts => :foobar do
  attributes :id, :title
end

You can also extend other rabl templates to reduce duplication:

# app/views/users/show.json.rabl
child @address do
  extends "address/item"
end

or get access to the hash representation of another object:

code :location do
  { :place => partial("web/users/address", :object => @address) }
end

You can also append attributes to the root node:

glue @post do
  attribute :id => :post_id
end

There is also the ability to extend other rabl templates with additional attributes:

extends "base"

code :release_year do |m|
  date = m.release_date || m.series_start
  date.try(:year)
end

Issues

• I am sloppy and once again failed to unit test this. Don't use it in production until I do obviously.