Customize JSON in the Models Themselves

Optimizing the JSON

Suppose we wanted our widget’s API to use the JSON encoding we showed above. We could certainly achieve this in our controller like so:

def show
  widget = Widget.find(params[:id])

  render json: {
    widget: widget.as_json(
      methods: [ :user_facing_identifier ],
      except: [ :widget_status_id ],
      include:  [ :widget_status ]
    )
  }

end

Of course, if we need to implement the index method, that code would want to use the same options. We could create a private method in Api::V1::WidgetsController called ...