Ruby Templates

The simplest way to configure a Ruby template is by invoking the build-in format methods (to_hash, to_json, share_hash, to_xml, to_edi) on the local variable source, which represent the source record the template is being applied to. For example for a JSON template just the following code:

source.to_json

there are some options that can be used for the build-in methods, perhaps the template should be pretty JSON formatted, or some properties must be excluded:

source.to_json(pretty: true, ignore: 'id')

For the previous example where a data type is supposed to have the properties name and items where items is an association the above code will generate a JSON like this:

{
  "name": "A",
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "A1",
      "price": 1.0
    },
    {
      "name": "A2",
      "price": 2.0
    },
    {
      "name": "A3",
      "price": 3.0
    }
  ]
}

The build-in format methods use the data type structure to generate the template, by default all properties are included. Of course a JSON template with completely different entries can be configured by typing the appropriated ruby code. For example:

{
  name: source.name,
  count: source.items.count,
  price: source.items.inject(0) { |s, item| s + item.price }
}

will produce the following JSON

{
  "name": "A",
  "count": 3,
  "price": 6.0
}