Build your own JSON presenters with POROs (Plain Old Ruby Object)

I've talked about Active Model Serializers here and Jbuilder there. Now, I'd like to share with you how you can serialize your models in JSON without using any external gem, just Plain Old Ruby Objects.

We're going to build yet another simple Ruby on Rails application that will generate JSON for TV Shows and their episodes.

Source Code

Available here.

Setup the application

Let's get started.

rails new presenters_tuto

And generate our models/controllers :

rails g resource tv_show name:string rating:integer seasons_count:integer rails g resource season position:integer tv_show_id:integer rails g resource episode name:string season_id:integer

Add the relations between our models :

# app/models/tv_show.rb
class TvShow < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :seasons
end

# app/models/season.rb
class Season < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :tv_show
  has_many :episodes
end

# app/models/episode.rb
class Episode < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :season
end

And migrate :

rake db:migrate

Add an index action to the TvShows Controller :

# app/controllers/tv_shows_controller.rb
class TvShowsController < ApplicationController
  def index
  end
end

Sample Data

Finally, here's some sample data :

# db/seeds.rb
suits = TvShow.create! name: 'Suits', rating: 9, seasons_count: 4

s01 = suits.seasons.create! position: 1

s01.episodes.create! name: 'Pilot'
s01.episodes.create! name: 'Errors and Omissions'
s01.episodes.create! name: 'Inside Track'

PORO Presenters

Now it's time to create our JSON presenters. To do that, we're going to create a folder called 'presenters' under 'app'. For each model, we will create a model presenter to format the JSON. We're going to build those presenters on top of 'as_json'.

First, we need a parent presenter to remove some redundant code from the children :

# app/presenters/presenter
class Presenter

  def initialize(object)
    @object = object
  end

  def as_json
    raise 'as_json called on parent.'
  end

end

Then, we can create a presenter for a TV show :

# app/presenters/tv_show_presenter.rb
class TvShowPresenter < Presenter
  def as_json(*)
    {
      name: @object.name,
      rating: @object.rating,
      seasons_count: @object.seasons_count
    }
  end
end

And a presenter for a list of tv shows :

 # app/presenters/tv_shows_presenter.rb
class TvShowsPresenter < Presenter
  def as_json(*)
    {
      tv_shows: @object.map { |o| TvShowPresenter.new(o)  }
    }
  end
end

We can now use this in TvShowsController :

class TvShowsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render json: TvShowsPresenter.new(TvShow.all)
  end
end

And we get :

As you can see, it's very easy to create your own presenters.

Let's see how we can add our nested models. We need to create 'app/presenters/episode_presenter.rb' and 'app/presenters/season_presenter.rb'.

# app/presenters/season_presenter.rb
class SeasonPresenter < Presenter
  def as_json(*)
    {
      position: @object.position,
      epiodes:  @object.episodes.map {|e| EpisodePresenter.new(e) }
    }
  end
end

# app/presenters/episode_presenter.rb
class EpisodePresenter < Presenter
  def as_json(*)
    {
      name: @object.name
    }
  end
end

And update the TvShow presenter to include seasons :

# app/presenters/tv_show_presenter.rb
class TvShowPresenter < Presenter
  def as_json(*)
    {
      name: @object.name,
      rating: @object.rating,
      seasons_count: @object.seasons_count,
      seasons: @object.seasons.map {|s| SeasonPresenter.new(s) }
    }
  end
end

And we'll get a beautiful json :

The End

As you can see, implement your own clean JSON builders is not that hard. However, I would recommend using great gems like Active Model Serializers or Jbuilder to build your JSON. This article is more for knowledge purposes. If you have very specific needs, you can now build your own JSON building solution based on this tutorial.

Source Code 2

Available here.