What is this code add_to_serializer in all these plugins

Development
2

It’s essentially adding to the information that Discourse serializes out when sending that model to the client. For example, you may see a request to this endpoint when loading up a topic page:

http://meta.discourse.org/t/2349082394.json

which returns some payload like this:

{
  title: "Some topic title",
  archetype: 'regular',
  category_id: 7,
  post_stream: { posts: [...] },
  posts_count: 15,
  (etc etc.. lots more info about the topic in question)
}

Which is the json representation of a Discourse topic.

If I want to know more about the topic because of additional ‘stuff’ I do in my plugin, I can put in a line like

add_to_serializer :topic, :flag_name do
  object.flag_name # <- NB that 'object' here is the topic being serialized
end

(Also, by default, this method simply sends the specified message to ‘object’, meaning that

add_to_serializer :topic, :flag_name

is the same as

add_to_serializer :topic, :flag_name do
  object.flag_name
end

)

Once I’ve added the method to the serializer, I can end up with JSON output which includes that additional info

{
  title: "Some topic title",
  archetype: 'regular',
  category_id: 7,
  post_stream: { posts: [...] },
  posts_count: 15,
  flag_name: "some flag name"
  ...
}

Also note that you could achieve the same thing by overwriting the TopicSerializer class (which is exactly what the code snippet you’ve provided is doing)

# plugin.rb
TopicSerializer.class_eval do
  attributes :flag_name
  def flag_name
    object.flag_name
  end
end