Rails 3.1 deep nesting with RABL

Question

I'm using the RABL gem to render JSON user data for users of comments which are children of annotations which are children of images. I'd like to do something similar to:

object @image

node :annotations do
  @image.annotations.map { |a| {
    :id => a.id,
    :x1 => a.x1,
    :x2 => a.x2,
    :y1 => a.y1,
    :y2 => a.y2,
    node :comments do
      @image.annotations.comments.map { |c| {
       :body => c.body, 
       :user_id => c.user_id,
       :name => User.find(c.user_id).name,
       :user_icon => user_icon(User.find(c.user_id), 'square', 30)
      }} 
    end
  }}
end

I know this isn't valid in RABL, I also tried using child instead of node, but couldn't access the user data that way. How should I go about doing this and whats the proper syntax to make this happen?

Unbuckle

Answer 1

I got this answer from @calvin-l. The trick was to just map the a.comments then grab the data from each comment that way:

node :annotations do
  @image.annotations.map { |a| {
    :id => a.id,
    :x1 => a.x1,
    :x2 => a.x2,
    :y1 => a.y1,
    :y2 => a.y2,
    :comments => a.comments.map { |c| {
      :body => c.body,
      :created_at => c.created_at,
      :user => {
        :id => c.user.id,
        :facebook_id => c.user.facebook_id,
        :name => c.user.name,
        :username => c.user.username
      }
    }}
  }}
end

Unbuckle

+1. this way of creating a hash in a block saves a couple of lines but it's somewhat confusing (and unidiomatic). I was about to update it, but well, I guess it's not so bad after all. – Autotruck