<p>Is there an easy way to return data to web service clients in JSON using Rails?</p>

[{'answer_id': 57706, 'author': 'ceejayoz', 'author_id': 1902010, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1902010', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p><a href="http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoGenerateJSON" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoGenerateJSON</a></p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 57761, 'author': 'Orion Edwards', 'author_id': 234, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/234', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Rails monkeypatches most things you'd care about to have a <code>#to_json</code> method.</p>\n\n<p>Off the top of my head, you can do it for hashes, arrays, and ActiveRecord objects, which should cover about 95% of the use cases you might want. If you have your own custom objects, it's trivial to write your own <code>to_json</code> method for them, which can just jam data into a hash and then return the jsonized hash.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 70660, 'author': 'Evgeny', 'author_id': 11414, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/11414', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>There is a plugin that does just this,\n<a href="http://blog.labnotes.org/2007/12/11/json_request-handling-json-request-in-rails-20/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://blog.labnotes.org/2007/12/11/json_request-handling-json-request-in-rails-20/</a></p>\n\n<p>And from what I understand this functionality is already in Rails. But go see that blog post, there are code examples and explanations.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 245486, 'author': 'JasonOng', 'author_id': 6048, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6048', 'pm_score': 5, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>Rails resource gives a RESTful interface for your model. Let's see.</p>\n\n<h1>Model</h1>\n\n<pre><code>class Contact &lt; ActiveRecord::Base\n  ...\nend\n</code></pre>\n\n<h1>Routes</h1>\n\n<pre><code>map.resources :contacts\n</code></pre>\n\n<h1>Controller</h1>\n\n<pre><code>class ContactsController &lt; ApplicationController\n  ...\n  def show\n    @contact = Contact.find(params[:id]\n\n    respond_to do |format|\n      format.html \n      format.xml {render :xml =&gt; @contact}\n      format.js  {render :json =&gt; @contact.json}\n    end\n  end\n  ...\nend\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>So this gives you an API interfaces without the need to define special methods to get the type of respond required</p>\n\n<p>Eg.</p>\n\n<pre><code>/contacts/1 # Responds with regular html page\n\n/contacts/1.xml # Responds with xml output of Contact.find(1) and its attributes\n\n/contacts/1.js # Responds with json output of Contact.find(1) and its attributes\n</code></pre>\n"}, {'answer_id': 353525, 'author': 'Nils', 'author_id': 44232, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/44232', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>ActiveRecord also provides methods to interact with JSON. To create JSON out of an AR object, just call object.to_json. TO create an AR object out of JSON you should be able to create a new AR object and then call object.from_json.. as far as I understood, but this did not work for me.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/57665', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5988/']