A very nice question and I'm surprised as I thought this is a very common task nowadays such that I will have plenty of resources for this problem, however turned out not to be true.
My thoughts are as follows:
- Create some module that have the common logic between the API controllers and HTML controllers without returning json or rendering html, and include this module in both HTML controller and API controller, then do whatever you want, so for example:
module WebAndAPICommon
module Products
def index
@products = # do some logic here that will set @products variable
end
end
end
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
# default products controlelr, for rendering HMTL pages
include WebAndAPICommon
def index
super
end
end
module API
class ProductsController
include WebAndAPICommon
def index
super
render json: @products
end
end
end
