Comments on: Developing RESTful APIs in Rails http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/05/22/developing-restful-apis-in-rails/ Our latest geek adventures! Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:42:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Chris http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/05/22/developing-restful-apis-in-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-623 Chris Fri, 29 May 2009 19:39:29 +0000 http://www.suite75.net/blog/dev/developing-restful-apis-in-rails.html#comment-623 Thanks for the explanation and solution... my to_xml calls were getting ugly so I did the exact same thing: made the options hash a constant.. Thanks for the explanation and solution… my to_xml calls were getting ugly so I did the exact same thing: made the options hash a constant..

]]> By: Willem http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/05/22/developing-restful-apis-in-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-88 Willem Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:47:42 +0000 http://www.suite75.net/blog/dev/developing-restful-apis-in-rails.html#comment-88 Jaap solved to mysterious to_xml bug some time ago, and I thought it may be useful to others to post the solution here as well. Hopefully it will save others a lot of debugging, as we have wasted enough time on this "bug". It turned out that we provided options to to_xml as a constant (a Hash). A constant can't be reassigned, but the object that the constant holds <strong>can</strong> be altered. The implementation of to_xml puts an XML builder object in the options array. In production mode, this constant wasn't reloaded between requests, so the XML builder object was kept in the constant hash. After discovering, the solution was simple. Instead of <code>@projects.to_xml(DEFAULT_OPTIONS)</code>, use <code>@projects.to_xml(DEFAULT_OPTIONS.clone)</code> so the XML builder object will not be put into the constant but in a clone, which will be disgarded after the to_xml-method completes. Jaap solved to mysterious to_xml bug some time ago, and I thought it may be useful to others to post the solution here as well. Hopefully it will save others a lot of debugging, as we have wasted enough time on this “bug”.

It turned out that we provided options to to_xml as a constant (a Hash). A constant can’t be reassigned, but the object that the constant holds can be altered. The implementation of to_xml puts an XML builder object in the options array. In production mode, this constant wasn’t reloaded between requests, so the XML builder object was kept in the constant hash. After discovering, the solution was simple.

Instead of @projects.to_xml(DEFAULT_OPTIONS), use @projects.to_xml(DEFAULT_OPTIONS.clone) so the XML builder object will not be put into the constant but in a clone, which will be disgarded after the to_xml-method completes.

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