ActiveRecord makes it easy to get JSON output. All you need to do is to call to_json on the model.

Here is the snippet of the code from the blog engine that powers this blog.

def show
  @article = Article.find(params[:id], :include => :comments)
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.rss
    format.js do
      render :text => @article.to_json, :layout => false
    end
  end
end

You can see the output here .

If you are working on an API or if you need to refer to the JSON output time and again then the horizontal scrolling becomes a pain point. It would be really nice if the JSON output had line break like this .

Rails makes use of to_json method added to Hash in ActiveSupport. You can overwrite to_json method to get the desired output. This is what I have.

class Hash
  def to_json(options = {}) #:nodoc:
    options.reverse_merge! :spacer_size => 1    
    hash_keys = self.keys

    if except = options[:except]
      hash_keys = hash_keys - Array.wrap(except)
    elsif only = options[:only]
      hash_keys = hash_keys & Array.wrap(only)
    end

    spacer = ' '
    result = "\r\n #{spacer * options[:spacer_size]}{"
    result << hash_keys.map do |key|
      "#{ActiveSupport::JSON.encode(key.to_s)}: #{ActiveSupport::JSON.encode(self[key], options.merge(:spacer_size => options[:spacer_size]+7))}"
    end * " ,\r\n #{spacer * (options[:spacer_size]+1)}"
    
    result << '}'
    
  end
end

Now all json outputs are nicely displayed on the browser. No horizontal scrolling.