Ruby/Rails - Can't access JSON object attributes directly in controller

Question

I am setting up an API.

The client (using HTTParty) posts this to the API:

{:body => 
       {
        :product=> {:description=>"some text", :cost => "11.99"}, 
        :brand=>   {:name=>"BrandName", :etc =>"hey"}
       }
}

The server/api receives the post. Now, if I access params[:brand] I get:

{"name"=>"BrandName", "etc" =>"hey"}

If I do this:

Brand.new(params[:brand])

Then I get a new Brand object with the "name" and "etc" attributes populated correctly.

However, if I try to access params[:brand][:name] , I just get nil

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use params[:brand]["name"] or params["brand"]["name"]

Hash keys can be any sort of object. Common rails practice is to use symbols as hash keys, but when translated from JSON, the keys are likely to be strings.