best way to map fields between rails product and an api client product

[tonypm]

Hi,

I am working on building an api client for the Rakuten MarketPlace.  I have got some test requests for add delete update etc working and thought I should aim to structure it as a Gem and publish it so that others can use it/enhance it.

I havn't built a Gem before (worked mostly within the rails environment to date).

Have been reading and looking at other api client gems and am making progress on building something (still got a way to go to handle errors etc.)

To make the gem general purpose though, I am trying to figure out the best way to provide the mapping between models in a rails app and  the api client objects (such as product, category, order etc).

I am aiming to make each client api object a class be  (or should i call them models?)
Then I suspect I will use new to build an api instance from a rails instance, and find to return an api instance to a rails instance.

i can build in mapping for my own models to the api objects with no problem, but I can't see how I could generalize this so that other apps with similar models could use the gem.

I suspect there are approaches for doing this, but so far I haven't managed to come up with how to do it.  If anyone has any wisdom on the matter I would be grateful.

Tony Martin

[dasibre]

I'm not completely certain, but I think you might find some insight by looking at ActiveModel

[tonypm]

Thank you for that, I am still building  the client gem itself, but you did prompt me to look around a bit.   Took a look at active resource, and the Schema and attributes stuff is going along the path I was looking for.  I suspect that I might even be able to make ActiveResource work with the Rakuten RMS API, but at the moment I am content to lift some bits from ActiveResource, which should also give me the info I need to make the errors stuff rails consistent.

I am still not sure how I am going to map from Rails models to my Rakuten client models, but I am getting nearer.

Thanks