Customising JSON response in ruby on rails

Question

I'm really new to JSON so I apologise if this problem is trivial.

I am working on implementing an in-app notification feature for a ruby on rails project and successfully did so. However, my app has different models and I'm not sure how to customise the url in JSON. Right now, it only works for entry_path but I would like it to be able to get the URL for other objects. Also, I was wondering if it is possible to change the a to an for json.type depending on the context. Thank you and any help is greatly appreciated!

 json.array! @notifications do |notification|
    #json.recipient notification.recipient
    json.id notification.id
    json.actor notification.actor.firstname
    json.action notification.action
    json.title notification.title
    json.notifiable do
        json.type "a #{notification.notifiable.class.to_s.underscore.humanize.downcase}"
    end
    json.url entry_path(notification.notifiable.entry, anchor: dom_id(notification.notifiable))
end

Answer 1

I think a more scalable solution would be to override the notification class as_json method.

class Notification

def as_json
{
id: id
actor: actor.firstname
action: action
title: title
notifiable: {type: get_type}
url: get_url
}
end

def get_type
# Type logic
end

def get_url
# url logic
end

end

and then you can call notification.to_json in your loop