👀 Views: 893 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

ruby-on-rails activemodel-serializers api Ruby

I'm dealing with I'm working with Rails 7.1 and I've integrated ActiveModel::Serializers to customize the JSON responses for my API. However, I'm working with an scenario where certain attributes that I expect to be included in the serialized output are returning `nil`. I've defined a serializer for my `Post` model, but it seems like the `author` association is not being serialized correctly. Here's the serializer I created: ```ruby class PostSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :id, :title, :content, :author_name def author_name object.author.name if object.author end end ``` In my controller, I'm fetching the posts like this: ```ruby class PostsController < ApplicationController def index posts = Post.includes(:author).all render json: posts, each_serializer: PostSerializer end end ``` When I hit the `/posts` endpoint, the `author_name` field is showing up as `null` for some records even though the associations are correctly set up. I've double-checked that the authors exist in the database, and I can confirm that the `Post` model has a valid `belongs_to :author` association. I've tried various ways to debug this, including checking the SQL logs to see if the authors are being correctly preloaded, and they are. However, for posts without an associated author, I’d expect my custom method to return nothing rather than a `null`. I also tried changing the `if object.author` condition to just `object.author&.name`, but it didn't resolve the scenario. Any insights on why I might be seeing these `nil` values in my JSON response or how to ensure that the `author_name` is always included in the response as intended? My team is using Ruby for this web app. Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm on Windows 10 using the latest version of Ruby.