Marble is a Ruby object builder. It makes generating complex Ruby objects, and by extension JSON and YAML, much more readable. It's especially useful for Rails JSON API templates.
Installation
Marble works both with and without Rails. Installation is as simple as adding
this line to your Gemfile
:
gem 'marble'
If you'd like to use marble without bundler, you can also directly install the gem:
gem install marble
Usage
First, require marble and create a builder.
require 'marble'
builder = Marble.new
This builder can build any Ruby object using the #build
method. The yielded
value is the current builder:
builder.build do |m|
['foo']
end # => ['foo']
However, this isn't very useful. The #array
and #hash
methods are far more
interesting. They allow you to build complex arrays and hashes in a minimal
amount of lines:
builder.array do |m|
m.item 'foo'
end # => ['foo']
builder.hash do |m|
m.foo 'bar'
end # => { 'foo' => 'bar' }
The returned value can be converted to JSON and YAML, giving you a really concise way of creating JSON and YAML templates for API's.
See the Marble
documentation for more details.
Usage with Rails
Marble provides a template handler for Rails. It supports object literal, JSON,
and YAML output formats. Name your view template with the extension marble
.
The template creates a builder with the name marble
for you to use. You can
rename it using the block parameter. For example, in order to generate a JSON
view:
# view_name.json.marble
marble.hash do |m|
m.foo 'bar'
end
# Renders: {"foo": "bar"}
See the Marble::RailsTemplateHandler
documentation for more details.
Note on Patches/Pull Requests
- Fork the project.
- Make your feature addition or bug fix.
- Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
- Commit, but do not mess with the
Rakefile
. If you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump the version in a commit by itself in another branch so I can ignore it when I pull. - Send me a pull request. Bonus points for git flow feature branches.
Resources
License
Marble is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE
for details.