Rails model to hash, exclude attributes

json, ruby-on-rails

Solution

Rendering json data first automagically calls 'as_json' on your model, which returns a ruby hash. After that, 'to_json' is called on that to get a string representation of your hash.

To achieve what you wanted, you can call something like this:

render :json => {
  :user => @user.as_json(:except => [:hashed_password]),
  :some_other_data => {}
}

In this case, there is no object which responds to 'as_json', so the controller just calls 'to_json' to turn your hash to a string.

Problem

I am trying to form a json response that looks like this: ``` { "user": { "birthday": "2013-03-13", "email": "example@example", "id": 1, "name": null, "username": "example" }, "other_data": "foo" } ``` Before, when I was just returning the user, I used ``` render :json => @user, :except => [:hashed_password, :created_at, :updated_at] ``` to keep the hashed_password, created_at, and updated_at attributes from being sent. Is there a way to do this, but also allow additional data to be sent along with the user? Right now I'm just adding the attributes I want to send to the hash one by one, but this is obviously not ideal.

Original source