setting new default properties for to_xml serializer in Rails

Question

In Rails, I'm coding a series of controllers to generate XML. Each time I'm passing a number of properties in to to_xml like:

to_xml(:skip_types => true, :dasherize => false)

Is there a way I can set these as new default properties that will apply whenever to_xml is called in my app so that I don't have to repeat myself?

Answer 1

Are you calling to_xml on a hash or an ActiveRecord model (or something else)?

I am not that you would want to, but you can easily monkey patch to_xml and redefine it to start with those parameters. I would suggest that you make a new method to_default_xml that simply called to_xml with the parameters you wanted

def to_default_xml
  self.to_xml(:skip_types => true, :dasherize => false)
end

Update:

Since you want to add this to a couple of ActiveRecord models you could do two things, open up ActiveRecord::base (which is a bit hackish and fragile) or create a module and import it into every model you want to use with it. A little more typing, but much cleaner code.

I would put a class in lib/ that looks something like this:

module DefaultXml
  def to_default_xml
    self.to_xml(:skip_types => true, :dasherize => false)
  end
end

Then in your models:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  include DefaultXml
end

Answer 2

Assuming you're talking about AR's to_xml method and depending on your needs, you could get away with extending the AcitveRecord class by creating a file named: lib\class_extensions.rb

class ActiveRecord::Base   
   def to_xml_default
      self.to_xml(:skip_types => true, :dasherize => false)
   end
end

Next, put this in an initializer, so that it's included when Rails starts up:

require 'class_extensions'

Now, you can use it as follows (w/o having to specifically include it in each model):

MyModel.to_xml_default

Answer 3

I put together a plugin to handle default serialization options. Check it out at github.com/laserlemon/dry_serial/tree/master.

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  dry_serial :skip_types => true, :dasherize => false
end

It also has support for multiple serialization styles that can be called like:

@my_model.to_xml(:skinny)
@my_model.to_xml(:fat)