Rails 3 - Creating a JSON response to display Search Results

Question

Hello, I'm working to have Rails 3 respond with a JSON request which will then let the app output the search results with the jQuery template plugin...

For the plugin to work, it needs this type of structure:

[
 { title: "The Red Violin", url: "/adadad/123/ads", desc: "blah yada" },
 { title: "Eyes Wide Shut", url: "/adadad/123/ads", desc: "blah yada" },
 { title: "The Inheritance", url: "/adadad/123/ads", desc: "blah yada" }
]

In my Rails 3 controller, I'm getting the search results which come back as @searchresults, which contain either 0 , 1 , or more objects from the class searched.

My question is how to convert that to the above structure (JSON)...

Thank you!

Update Forgot to mention. The front-end search page will need to work for multiple models which have different db columns. That's why I'd like to learn how to convert that to the above to normalize the results, and send back to the user.

Answer 1

I am not really sure what is the problem here, since you can always call ".to_json" on every instance or collection of instances or hash, etc.

You can use .select to limit the number of fields you need, ie:

Object.select(:title, :url, :desc).to_json

I am guessing that the @searchresults is ActiveRecord::Relation, so you probably can use:

@searchresults.select(:title, :url, :desc).to_json