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When talking about Ruby on Rails API versioning, it's common to create a division in the controller level. They create new routes with new controllers in different modules, such as API::V2::ProductsController and so on.

The problem is: not all the code is in the controllers. Even a simple Ruby on Rails application has its code shared between models, views (which in this case would be the serializers) and controllers. Not to mention jobs, mailers and application specific libraries (lib/ directory) code.

Even if you version the controller with new controllers with different routes, the model would be the same for every version, and so would be the views and the database schema itself.

I know ActiveModelSerializer, one of the most used serializing gems, does implement versioning, but still, Rails models don't support versioning by default.

Is there a way to really version a Ruby on Rails API?

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  • Define "really version a RoR API". Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 2:36
  • @jvillian Just like I said in the question: versioning models, views, controllers and etc. More than just the controllers. But the whole logic. Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 3:02
  • What's to stop you from namespacing models under the version number? And won't views be versioned along with their versioned controllers? Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 3:08

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I would say that your view layer: your serializers or .rabl or .jbuilder files should contain as much presentation logic as possible (ideally all!). Thus: how this data is displayed to the user: a pretty formatted string, a JSON document with a certain structure, a JSON document with a slightly different structure.

If you have a User model, and you want to format the date a user joined the site, don't implement a User#dateUserJoinedISOStr method, but instead in the serializer get the date field and do the transformation to the proper iso string there.

Then you can switch on the API version requested, or use a completely different serializer if the changes between the two API versions are just too different.

Theoretically maybe you even think of the two api versions as different representations of the same resource, and use / abuse Rails content type format tools to pick the right content template.

This of course gets harder if you have a site that returns HTML as well as JSON (or, to put it a better way, "HTML representations in addition to JSON representations"). In that case I'd either use some clever route magic such that the version comes through the params OR buck convention a little bit and don't put a version number in your URL path (instead use a header!). Regardless, if your routes always go to the same place, then either have some if statements in the controller (to select the correct version serializer) OR a bunch of if statements in the serializer ("display that now, or not?").

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