Rails - Consuming local JSON API from another controller

Question

I am building an App that serves as the backend for an android app as well as a rails webapp. To serve as a back end, I have built a series of api controllers ( ex: api_users contoller with actions show, update etc.) which will return a JSON/ XML output (using RABL).

In my Webapp, when it is time to update the User profile say, I simply want to call the update action of the api_users controller and parson the json output in my User's controller, parse this output and then handoff the data to my view etc. How do I go about making such calls?

A very bad workaround seems to be to treat it like any external API and call it using Net::Http etc. Can somebody help/ guide me to the recommended way of doing this?

Thanks,

Ramkumar.

• Andy: possible duplicate of How do I specify the format for url_for in a nested route?
• Andy: When creating the link with link_to, specify the format option. See the duplicate question for more information.
• lewstherin: Um...I am not trying to specify a link; I want to use one of my controllers as an API from within my App. So, essentially I want to call an action of a different controller and process the output within my controller action.
• Arctodus: Calling one controller action from another controller action requires breaking the design of Rails, so it would be a workaround yes. I imagine you would be better off extracting the logic related to updating a profile into the model layer, and use that in both controller actions, or just use a single controller action for both cases.
• lewstherin: It seems very strange that I should be able to call an external api, but there is no easy way to call my own on the same app. After all, I am not exactly breaking MVC here, all I am asking for is a complete request cycle to be processed. And this is just so that I can avoid repeating myself.

Answer 1

Since I did not find any simple way to do this, I decided to treat it like an external api. Only instead of going all the way to the dns and back, I decided to simply call it using off of localhost.