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358 CHAPTER 13 Designing an API
Booyah, it works! How about bin/rspec spec/api/v1/projects_spec.rb too?
1 example, 0 failures
All green there too, and so it’s definitely time to do a commit now. You should run the
customary checks before you commit by running rake cucumber:ok spec:
63 scenarios (63 passed)
732 steps (732 passed)
# and
43 examples, 0 failures, 19 pending
Great! Everything’s still green. From now on you will only run the spec tests, because
all you are going to be changing is the API, which will not impact anything that the features
test. At the end of the chapter, you’ll run it again to make sure that nothing is
broken. Commit and push the changes that you’ve made:
git add .
git commit -m "Implemented token-based authentication API base"
git push
You’ve begun to implement the API now, and you’ve got the /api/v1/projects URL
returning a list of the projects that a user can see. To check what user this is, you’ve
implemented a basic token authentication using functionality built in to Devise.
There’s still a little way to go before you’re done with the API. For starters, this API
only serves JSON requests, and some people who use it may wish for the data to be
returned in XML. You’ve also only got the one action in your controller, and you need
to implement a way for people to create, update, and delete projects through the API.
Before you do that, you’ll add in support for XML. This is incredibly easy to implement,
as you’ll soon see.
13.1.5 Serving XML
So far, you’ve been using the respond_with and respond_to methods to serve JSON
responses. You can serve XML using these same methods while continuing to serve
JSON. It’s very, very easy. First of all, you’re going to want to create a test to make sure
that your new XML data is being returned correctly. You’ll place this test in the index
context for “projects viewable by this user” in spec/api/v1/projects_spec.rb using the
code from the following listing.
Listing 13.7 spec/api/v1/projects_spec.rb
it "XML" do
get "#{url}.xml", :token => token
last_response.body.should eql(Project.readable_by(user).to_xml)
projects = Nokogiri::XML(last_response.body)
projects.css("project name").text.should eql("Ticketee")
end
In this spec you use the nokogiri gem to parse the XML (in chapter 6, you used it to
parse HTML). Then you use the css method to find an element called name inside