Can you serialize a controller?

Dev
1

Hi Discourse community. I didn’t find a similar topic so I thought I’d start one.

I’m using a plugin to extend Discourse functionality for my organization’s purposes. One of these is rendering a JSON from email/unsubscribe/{KEY}, as we’d like to control these options from a different server than the one we run our Discourse instance. That endpoint is under the purview of the EmailController, and by default the EmailControllerHelper sets instance variables for the controller before rendering a view. Instead, I’d like to return the EmailController as a JSON.

So my question at base is, is it possible to serialize a controller? i.e., can I define a serializer for the controller like this:

  class ::EmailController
    # THE FILE THIS MODIFIES: app/controllers/email_controller.rb
    # Return a json

    module ReturnAsJSON
      def unsubscribe
        super

        render EmailUnsubscribeSerializer.new(self, root: false).to_json
      end
    end

    prepend ReturnAsJSON
  end

  class EmailUnsubscribeSerializer < ApplicationSerializer
    attributes :topic, :type, :unsubscribed_from_all, :user

    def user
      BasicUserSerializer.new(object.user, root: false).as_json
    end
  end

or am I better off brute forcing this?

  class ::EmailController
    # THE FILE THIS MODIFIES: app/controllers/email_controller.rb
    # Return a json

    module ReturnAsJSON
      def unsubscribe
        super

        render json: {type: @type, unsubscribed_from_all: @unsubscribed_from_all, etc.}
      end
    end

    prepend ReturnAsJSON
  end

The 2nd approach looks like it works, so if the 1st approach doesn’t at least I have a decent workaround.

2

Search existing plugins or discourse source for add_to_serializer.

1 Like
3

Thanks @pfaffman , but I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for. I tried that route for a while, (and actually use it else where in our custom plugin), but I don’t know if it will help here… As far as I can tell, NO controlller in the Discourse repo is serialized. I’m not trying to ADD to an existing serializer, I’m trying to CREATE a new one.

1 Like
4

Ah. Then you need to add a Rails model and then also add a model to Ember. I have done it several times and still find it very confusing.

Check out an other plugin that adds a route. Subscriptions is one, but you might also get GitHub - discourse/all-the-plugins and then do a find for “route*”. The Rails part is in config and the Ember part is in assets/javascripts/discourse/routes.

1 Like
5

Great, thanks. I might be able to get away with not using Ember, as our users aren’t meant to see the Discourse frontend at all.

I have done it several times and still find it very confusing.

This is some comfort here. I’ll maybe opt for my 2nd route above and assess whether a new endpoint is needed here. Thanks!

6

That makes it much easier (for me, especially). So after you add the route you pull /your-new-route.json and that should do the trick and then you can avoid the other 3-5 files (or is it 500?) that you have to create in Ember.

So you add the route and then add the controller and the model. I think it’s just those 3 files that you have to create.

1 Like