Extend a standard Rails application to API

[Serguei Cambour]

What is the best way to add some API-ish behaviour to a standard Rails application ? I mean, is it possible to add some new actions to a controller or modify the existing ones so that they return JSON (without specifying JSON extension in the URL (like http://myhost.com/books and not http://myhost.com/books.json and be able to return either HTML or JSON in the same time? Thank you.

[Serguei Cambour]

On Sunday, 10 December 2017 19:47:18 UTC+1, Serguei Cambour wrote:

What is the best way to add some API-ish behaviour to a standard Rails application ? I mean, is it possible to add some new actions to a controller or modify the existing ones so that they return JSON (without specifying JSON extension in the URL (like http://myhost.com/books and not http://myhost.com/books.json and be able to return either HTML or JSON in the same time? Thank you.

I think the simplest solution would be to add the following to a new action:

def index

    @books = Book.all

    render json: @books

  end

When trying it with httpi here the response I get:

➜  rails_app git:(master) ✗ http :3000/books

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

ETag: W/"966ef6fc32020fa85b7250fa20f25208"

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

X-Request-Id: 893c63ac-b9e3-40ee-b8f5-7b9938916ca5

X-Runtime: 0.359281

X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

[

    {

        "created_at": "2017-12-10T16:06:29.896Z",

        "id": 1,

        "isbn": "12345",

        "title": "Java",

        "updated_at": "2017-12-10T16:06:29.896Z"

    }

]