Active Record Question

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi...I am only 1 day into Rails, so please forgive me if this is a lame question!

I have the following models:

require 'books_projects.rb'

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :book_to_projects   has_many :books, :through => :book_to_projects end

require 'books_projects.rb'

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :book_to_projects   has_many :projects, :through => :book_to_projects end

In my projects controller, I am trying to do this:

@projects = Project.find(:all, :include => [:books])

My hope is to get a nested data structure back that looks something like:

projects: [   {     ..,     books: [         {           ..         },         {           ..         }     ]   } ]

But that does't work. How can I achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

2

In my projects controller, I am trying to do this:

@projects = Project.find(:all, :include => [:books])

My hope is to get a nested data structure back that looks something like:

Well you what you get back is an array of projects where the book objects have already been fetched fro the database If you call to_json(:include => :books) then you should get output pretty similar to what you've described.

Fred

3

That did the trick! Thanks!

But, I am sorry I did not get your explanation. Forgive me, I am very new to Ruby and Rails. Could you please explain why it didn't work before, and why it worked your way?

4

Also, in my controller, I'd like to call the parent controller's method to format my json in a certain way...So instead of this:

respond_to do |format|   format.json { render :json => @projects.to_json(:include => [:apps]) } end

I'd like to do something like this:

result = <nested data> respond_to do |format|   format.json { render :json => some_method_in_parent_controller(result) } end

So all my other controllers that subclass this parent application controller can pass data to this parent controller's method and format the data in a particular way.

How do I achieve this? Please help! Thanks!