How to turbocharge your Rails API
By: Wick Bushong
Tags: Serialization, Ruby, Json, Rails, React

Building an API with Rails is super easy. Active Model makes managing your domain model relationships and querying your database headache-free. Namespacing your API routes only requires a few lines of code and mapping your controllers to namespaced routes only requires one line of code. Active Model Serializers make your JSON responses extremely customizable. On top of all that Rails generators will whip up the structure of your build with a single bash command. Oh ya, and they even have a flag to indicate that you’re generating an API.

rails new my_api --api

Yes, it’s that easy. Rails leaves a lot to ‘the man behind the curtain’ but it also gives developers easy-to-use tools to expand on whatever they drum up with generators.

this is me coding

Let’s work up an example domain: we want to keep track of users that visit our business.

A Business has_many Visits

A User also has_many Visits

Visits belong_to both Businesses and Users

Visits act as a join table between Users and Businesses

Businesses/Users has_many of each other through Visits.

We’re concerned with finding Visits that overlap with each other. So let’s put columns in the Visits table for :time_in and :time_out. Let’s also add a boolean :flagged column to the table and have it default to false (this will come in handy later). I won’t dive into how to set these resources and relationships up but you can read more about that here: Rails Generators, Rails Associations.

How do we find overlapping visits you ask? Well let’s think about the conditions of an overlap:

userA and userB need to visit the same Business (duh)

AND userA doesn’t leave before userB arrives

AND userB doesn’t leave before userA arrives

If all of those conditions are true then the visits in question will have some overlap time with each other. We can reflect these conditions in an instance method inside of the Visit model:

i’ve been waiting here for 45 minutes for b to arrive

Now that we’ve got that in our back pocket let’s talk about Active Model Serializers. First off: to use them you need to include

gem ‘active_model_serializers’

in your GemFile then bundle install . We want to use them so that our JSON responses have overlap_visits nested in them. We’ll run rails g serializer visit to generate the serializer, then fill it with a few attributes:

The beauty of this serializer is that if you call render json: visit in any controller action the JSON will automatically be formatted according to the attributes specified in the serializer. The response will have the :id , :business_id , :time_in , and :time_out attributes inside of the JSON object as well as all top-level attributes of :user . Pretty sweet. Now let’s get fancy and add :overlap_visits to the serializer. We define an instance method inside the serializer that calls the . overlap_visits instance method we defined in the Visits model. Before we do that, let’s take a look at an instance of VisitSerializer:

lot going on here. please ignore most of it.

Ok — main takeaway: if we want to interact with the instance of Visit while we’re inside of the VisitSerializer we will call object , not self . Now let’s move on to that VisitSerializer instance method — inside of it we’ll map over object.overlap_visits (because its an array of Visits), and serialize each Visit. Don’t forget to add :overlaps to the attributes list:

Ok now lets seed some overlapping visits and send a get request to /visits/1 to test things out…

this means you’ve dun goof’d

Oh no! We’re making an infinitely nested JSON object. No worries. That’s why we gave Visit a :flagged attribute! We’re gonna do 2 things: temporarily flag a visit in our controller action, and we’ll make :overlaps a conditional attribute in our serializer like so:

super serial