CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosruby-on-rails
jckly
jckly

Reputation: 851

Rails api for iOS app?

I'm developing a iOS app and want it to talk to a rails server.

I was wondering the normal approach for making API's for iOS consumption is? My original plan was to develop the site in rails with the functionality and the way I want it to work and then take that site and create an API for it. This seems overkill considering I don't want a web version of the app.

I'm interested to hear if anyone has had any experience with approaching this or how they would go about it.

I know I could develop the API standalone but am unsure how to develop the site functionality within a standalone API without views e.g using the rails-api gem.

Sorry if this questions is not explained well as I'm still relatively new to rails.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 403

Answers (2)

Ashley Williams
Ashley Williams

Reputation: 6840

Use ActiveModelSerializers with the JSONAPI adapter, and jsonapi-ios on the iPhone. That way you have a well thought out JSON format out of the box.

For authentication I'd recommend Devise with devise_token_auth, and for roles the cancancan gem.

Upvotes: 1

Tim Sawtell
Tim Sawtell

Reputation: 307

Assumption: rails 4+, you want the API to be JSON based.

If you use scaffold to create your model objects the you've got the API pretty much written for you. I mean it will create the views for you, and it's up to you to do any changes you want to the controller.rb (probably not) and to the view (action.json.jbuilder).

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/v3.2.13/getting_started.html

(go to) 5 Getting Up and Running Quickly with Scaffolding

A common change you'll make will be formatting a datetime property from your Rails model to be a certain format (lets go with unix timestamp), so you put those changes in your action jbuilder file, i.e 

app/views/person/show.json.jbuilder

json.extract! @person, :first_name, :last_name, :id
json.date @person.date_of_birth.to_i

So now when you browse to

/person/23.json

you'll get

{
"first_name":"Rails",
"last_name":"is great",
"id": 23,
"date_of_birth": 1395101106
}

In summary, use 

rails generate scaffold model_name property:string other_property:int

for your model objects

Upvotes: 1

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