Check format of JSON in Rails API or not?

Question

I am designing an API with Rails 4, and right now I have the following for the create action of my Orders controller:

def create
    begin
      @order = @api_user.orders.create!(order_params)
      render :json => @order, :only => [:id], :status => :created, :location => @order
    rescue
      render :json => {}, :status => :unprocessable_entity
    end
  end

With this, I ask the user to send a JSON that looks like this:

{"order" : {"description_1" : "Neque porro quisquam", "description_2" : "Neque porro quisquam", "types_attributes" : [{"url" : "http://test.com"}]}}

So, all I do to check the params is:

params.require(:order).permit(:description_1, :description_2, {types_attributes: [:url]})

My question is:

If I want to avoid the user to have to specify the "order" key in the JSON params, how would I call the create action? Would I need to do orders.create!(key1: params[:key1],...)?

What is the common approach to solve this?

steakchaser · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-07 16:35:28Z

0

If the params contains the attributes for an Order, then you just need to use:

@order = @api_user.orders.create!(params)

answered May 7, 2014 at 16:35

steakchaser

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4 Comments

Hommer Smith Over a year ago

But is the approach to go and check those params for possible bad formatting? Or should I just try to create it?

steakchaser Over a year ago

I would rely on your strong parameters settings and AR validations to do the checking on the data. If these fail (using create!), you will get an exception.

Hommer Smith Over a year ago

Say I want to let the user to give me the IDS of an association, obviously I need to get those ids and make sure they exist in the database. Then it makes sense to check the JSON right?

steakchaser Over a year ago

Yeah, that would be smart. I would do this via a custom validation though, so that the logic is consolidated into your model with the rest of the validations. You could check for the existence of associated ids and add to the errors hash (:base or association) if one of the ids is not valid.

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