👀 Views: 263 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

ruby rails active-model-serializer

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm having trouble with customizing the JSON serialization of nested ActiveRecord associations in my Rails 7.1 application. I have a `User` model that has many `Posts`, and each `Post` has many `Comments`. I want to include specific fields from the `User` and the `Post` in the JSON response while excluding some fields that are not necessary. However, when I serialize the data, it seems to include unwanted fields and the structure is not what I expect. I am using `ActiveModel::Serializers` for this. Here’s a simplified version of my serializers: ```ruby class UserSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :id, :name has_many :posts end class PostSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :id, :title, :body has_many :comments end class CommentSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :id, :content end ``` When I try to render the `User` with its posts, like this: ```ruby render json: @user, serializer: UserSerializer ``` I'm getting a JSON response that includes all attributes of the `Post` and `Comment` models, even the ones I want to exclude, like `created_at` and `updated_at`. The JSON output looks something like this: ```json { "id": 1, "name": "John Doe", "posts": [ { "id": 1, "title": "First Post", "body": "This is the content of the first post", "created_at": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z", "updated_at": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z", "comments": [ { "id": 1, "content": "Great post!", "created_at": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z", "updated_at": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z" } ] } ] } ``` I’ve tried using `attributes :id, :title, :body` in my `PostSerializer`, but it still includes `created_at` and `updated_at`. Additionally, I want to ensure that the `CommentSerializer` includes only the `content` and `id`. I don’t see any settings in the `ActiveModel::Serializer` documentation that addresses this directly. Is there a way to customize the serialization to exclude certain fields properly? Any advice or solutions would be greatly appreciated! I'd be grateful for any help.