Suggestions on formatting JSON serialization?

[chrismanderson]

Hello! Experimenting with the gem with a basic rails api - any suggestions on a good entry point/mechanism for customizing the JSON output of a ActiveRecord attribute storing a Tod::TimeOfDay? I'd like to show the outpost as a '11:00:00' for example rather than the components.

I'm just using a simple as_json for my models. There's lots of ways of doing this of course, adding a method that does the string formatting, using ActiveModelSerializers and overriding the attribute getter, but I'd like to find a higher-level way of customizing the output, if possible. Thank you!

[jackc]

I'm not exactly sure what your asking for, but I'm open to adding as_json to Tod::TimeOfDay. That might do what you want.

[chrismanderson]

That's pretty much what I'm looking for!

Should have clarified more, but say I have a class

class Reservation < ActiveRecord::Base
  attribute :name, :string
  attribute :time, :time_only
end

Outputting this class to JSON (without any custom serialization) would give me

{
  'name': 'My reservation',
  'time': {
    'hour': 11,
    'minute': 0,
    'second': 0,
    'second_of_day': 39600
  }
}

But I'd love to able to output something like

{
  'name': 'My reservation',
  'time': '11:00:00'
}

And, there are ways to do this with custom serializers and such for sure, but was looking for a way to avoid that, as I tend to output my Rails JSON objects without heavy serializers.

[jackc]

I haven't looked into internals of ActiveRecord lately but I presume the all that would be necessary adding this method to Tod::TimeOfDay:

def as_json; to_s; end

Maybe you could try monkey patching to see if that does what you want. If it does, I could merge a PR with that method.

[dush]

It works as expected

# Fix JSON serialization of Tod::TimeOfDay
module TimeOfDayAsJson
  def as_json(*)
    to_s
  end
end

Tod::TimeOfDay.include TimeOfDayAsJson

Tod::TimeOfDay("12:23:45").as_json
=> "12:23:45"