How to customize to_json response in Rails 3

Question

I am using respond_with and everything is hooked up right to get data correctly. I want to customize the returned json, xml and

Answer 1

Probably too late, but I found a more DRY solution digging through the rails docs. This works in my brief tests, but may need some tweaking:

# This method overrides the default by forcing an :only option to be limited to entries in our
# PUBLIC_FIELDS list
def serializable_hash(options = nil)
  options ||= {}
  options[:only] ||= []
  options[:only] += PUBLIC_FIELDS
  options[:only].uniq!
  super(options)
end

This basically allows you to have a list of fields that are allowed for your public API, and you cannot accidentally expose the whole object. You can still expose specific fields manually, but by default your object is secure for .to_json, .to_xml, etc.