Several times recently, there have been questions in the #sinatra channel, and on the mailing list about how to automatically render JSON, or any other kind of format as the response from Sinatra.

My favorite way of accomplishing this is to wrap the normal get and post methods with additional JSON abilities.

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'json'
 
def json_get(route, options={}, &block)
  get(route, options) do 
    block.call.to_json
  end
end
 
json_get '/' do
  {"bar" => "baz", "foo" => "bar"}
end

And of course, this can be expanded to other cases where you’d want to pre-process or post-process certain routes. You could easily define an admin_get that checks that the user is logged in as an admin. Or an xml_get, or a timed_get method.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.