Rails 2.3.4, json gem : to_json issue

looks invalid to me:

$ sc Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3)

Item.new.to_json SQL (0.1ms) SET SQL_AUTO_IS_NULL=0 Item Columns (2.0ms) SHOW FIELDS FROM items => "{item

dear lighthouse,
whatever you're doing with my text, you're doing it wrong
pastie does it pretty well though
bai

http://pastie.org/631729

Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)
>> Item.new.to_json
=> "{\"item\":{\"created_at\":null,\"updated_at\":null}}"

Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3)
>> Item.new.to_json
=> "{\"item\":{\"created_at\":null,\"updated_at\":null}}"

-1 ,going to say invalid.

-1, not reproducible.

Looks to me like there's no difference between 2.3.3 and 2.3.4:

ts > ruby script/console 
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3)
>> Event.new(:name => "test", :when => 2.days.from_now).to_json
=> "{\"event\":{\"name\":\"test\",\"updated_at\":null,\"when\":\"2009-09-28T21:08:03Z\",\"created_at\":null}}"

ts > ruby script/console 
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)
>> Event.new(:name => "test", :when => 2.days.from_now).to_json
=> "{\"event\":{\"name\":\"test\",\"updated_at\":null,\"when\":\"2009-09-28T21:08:27Z\",\"created_at\":null}}"

-1 - cannot reproduce

This bug is reproducible:

No json or json_pure gem installed in the system:

Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3)

Event.find(9).to_json => "{">event

After "gem install json":

Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)

Event.find(9).to_json => "{">attributes

This bug is reproducible:

No json or json_pure gem installed in the system:

Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.3) >> Event.find(9).to_json => "{attributes

I'm seeing this too. +1

To confirm the approach followed in Rails 3. The approach is to move the json code to ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON, and make sure to NOT use the json gem if is is present? Where is this code? Also, the serializer in ActiveModel doesn't have to_json, right? Where is the code to override the json gem? (I am new to contributing to rails core but want to help out so please be nice ;-)

The JSON code you're looking for is in active_support/json, not Active Model or Record :)

See active_support/json/encoding.rb in git master.

For me it was the contacts gem (http://github.com/mislav/contacts), which broke the to_json method. See the ticket on Github: http://github.com/mislav/contacts/issues/issue/3

I am the original reporter for this bug. Turns out I'm also using the contacts gem. Maybe that's the problem. I created a ticket :

http://github.com/cardmagic/contacts/issues/issue/14

Yes after removing the contacts gem it also went away for me...g damn why?

I've been upgrading our app from Rails 2.2.2 to 2.3.8 and hit this problem (and all sorts of other JSON craziness). I was stumped, changing ActiveSupport::JSON.backend in environment.rb was giving me no love. I eventually tracked down the source to a require of 'json/add/rails', which we were including so that we could hack the way JSON::Ext::Generator::State worked.

So, if you're hitting this problem the one thing you may want to do is search your codebase for a require of 'json/add/rails'... worked for me.

Heh, I spoke too soon...

For objects from classes that descend from ActiveRecord::Base removing the 'json/add/rails'require was all that was needed to get back to vanilla to_json. However, oddly, once I remove 'json/add/rails', if I leave in 'json/add/core' then non-AR::Base objects start to jsonize oddly:

# without 'json/add/rails', with 'json/add/core'
>> {:foo => :bar}.to_json
=> "{\"foo\":{\"json_class\":\"Symbol\",\"s\":\"bar\"}}"

# (without 'json/add/rails', without 'json/add/core') OR (with 'json/add/rails', with 'json/add/core')
>> {:foo => :bar}.to_json
=> "{\"foo\":{\"json_class\":\"Symbol\",\"s\":\"bar\"}}"