getting active records to display as a plist
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13-09-2019 - |
Question
I'm trying to get a list of active record results to display as a plist for being consumed by the iphone. I'm using the plist gem v 3.0.
My model is called Post. And I want Post.all (or any array or Posts) to display correctly as a Plist.
I have it working fine for one Post instance: [http://pastie.org/580902][1]
that is correct, what I would expect. To get that behavior I had to do this:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
def to_plist
attributes.to_plist
end
end
However, when I do a Post.all, I can't get it to display what I want. Here is what happens: http://pastie.org/580909
I get marshalling. I want output more like this: [http://pastie.org/580914][2]
I suppose I could just iterate the result set and append the plist strings. But seems ugly, I'm sure there is a more elegant way to do this.
I am rusty on Ruby right now, so the elegant way isn't obvious to me. Seems like I should be able to override ActiveRecord and make result-sets that pull back more than one record take the ActiveRecord::Base to_plist and make another to_plist implementation. In rails, this would go in environment.rb, right?
Solution
I took the easy way out:
private
# pass in posts resultset from finds
def posts_to_plist(posts)
plist_array = []
posts.each do |post|
plist_array << post.attributes
end
plist_array.to_plist
end
public
# GET /posts
# GET /posts.xml
def index
@posts = Post.all
#@posts = [{:a=>"blah"}, {:b=>"blah2"}]
respond_to do |format|
format.html # index.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => posts_to_plist(@posts) }
end
end
OTHER TIPS
I found this page searching for the same answer. I think you have the right approach, though I'm also a newbie (on Rails) and not sure the right way to do it. I added this to application_helper.rb. Seems to work.
require 'plist'
module ApplicationHelper
class ActiveRecord::Base
public
include Plist::Emit
def to_plist
self.attribute_names.inject({}) do |attrs, name|
value = self.read_attribute(name)
if !value.nil?
attrs[name] = value
end
attrs
end
end
end
end
According to the plist project README, you should implement "to_plist_node", as opposed to "to_plist".
You should also mixin Plist::Emit to your ActiveRecord class.