roar-rails

Makes using Roar's representers in your Rails app fun.

Features

• Rendering with responders
• Parsing incoming documents
• URL helpers in representers
• Better tests
• Autoloading

Rendering with #respond_with

Easily render resources using representers with the built-in responder.

class SingersController < ApplicationController
  include Roar::Rails::ControllerAdditions
  respond_to :json

  def show
    singer = Singer.find_by_id(params[:id])
    respond_with singer
  end
end

Need to use a representer with a different name than your model? Pass it in using the :with_representer option:

class SingersController < ApplicationController
  include Roar::Rails::ControllerAdditions
  respond_to :json

  def show
    singer = Musician.find_by_id(params[:id])
    respond_with singer, :with_representer => SingerRepresenter
  end
end

Goes great with Jose Valim's responders gem!

class SingersController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :json

  responders Roar::Rails::Responder

  def show
    singer = Singer.find_by_id(params[:id])
    respond_with singer
  end

end

Parsing incoming documents

In #create and #update actions it is often necessary to parse the incoming representation and map it to a model instance. Use the #consume! method for this.

class SingersController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :json

  def create
    singer = Singer.new
    consume!(singer)

    respond_with singer
  end
end

The consume! call will roughly do the following.

singer.
  extend(SingerRepresenter)
  from_json(request.body)

So, #consume! helps you figuring out the representer module and reading the incoming document.

URL Helpers

Any URL helpers from the Rails app are automatically available in representers.

module FruitRepresenter
  include Roar::Representer::JSON

  link :self do
    fruit_url self
  end

To get the hyperlinks up and running, please make sure to set the right host name in your environment files (config/environments):

config.representer.default_url_options = {:host => "127.0.0.1:3000"}

Testing

Autoloading

Put your representers in app/representers and they will be autoloaded by Rails. Also, frequently used modules as media representers and features don't need to be required manually.

Contributors

• Railslove and especially Michael Bumann [bumi] have heavily supported development of roar-rails ("resource :singers").