Jeremy Kemper

Great!

Users always call foo.to_json or ActiveSupport::JSON.encode(foo)

The implementor of Foo writes an as_json

Reviewing the examples above, this was fixed. Please verify on latest master!

Implementing as_json is right. Using to_json is a mess because JSON libraries use it for their internal encoding API.

This is similar to the Marshal library: yo...

I agree maybe_hash_maybe_nil.try(:[], key) is ugly. But the proxy approach is error-prone and less obvious.

A third way is to use instance_eval: list.try { self...

Workaround:

def self.old() where :status => 'old' end

The root fix is as Santiago suggests: building the relation should be lazy, not loading the table until ...