JSON Decode Parameter Issue

Question

I have a rails 4 application that uses postgresql. I also have a backbone.js application that pushes JSON to the rails 4 app.

Here's my controller:

def create
 @product = Product.new(ActiveSupport::JSON.decode product_params)

 respond_to do |format|
  if @product.save
    format.json { render action: 'show', status: :created, location: @product }
  else
    format.json { render json: @product.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
  end
 end
end
def product_params
  params.require(:product).permit(:title, :data)
end

I'm trying to parse the JSON and insert the product, but on insert, I'm getting the error:

TypeError (no implicit conversion of ActionController::Parameters into String):

Thanks for all help!

Answer 1

Your mileage may vary, but I fixed a smilar problem by a bandaid code like this:

hash = product_params
hash = JSON.parse(hash) if hash.is_a?(String)
@product = Product.new(hash)

The particular problem I had was that if I was just doing JSON.parse on the params that contained the object I wanted to create, I was getting this error while unit testing, but the code was working just fine when my web forms were submitting the data. Eventually, after losing 1 hour on logging all sorts of stupid things, I realized that my unit tests were somehow passing the request parameter in a "pure" form -- namely, the object was a Hash already, but when my webforms (or manual headless testing via cURL) did sumbit the data, the params were as you expect -- a string representation of a hash.

Using this small code snippet above is, of course, a bandaid, but it delivers.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Convert hash into JSON using to_json