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Creating Long-Lived Web Apps with Ruby on Rails

Always Use a Top Level Key

Understand the importance of including a top-level key in JSON responses within Rails API controllers. This lesson helps you create clear, maintainable JSON structures that provide context and allow easy inclusion of metadata. You'll learn why avoiding direct rendering of objects and arrays improves debugging and consistency in your API design.

We'll cover the following...

The example code we’ve seen thus far looks like this:

render json: { widget: widget }

Why didn’t we write only render json: widget?

Doing that would result in a JSON object like so:

{
  "id": 1234,
  "name": "Stembolt",
  "price_cents": 12345
}

There are two minor problems with this as the way our API renders JSON.

  • The first is that we cannot ...