X-Combinator

Unless I’m missing something, the default rails from_json and from_xml methods don’t work with data that have associated objects. Here are routines that work for some simple examples I’ve tested. I placed this code in vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb within the ActiveRecord::Base class, but there might be a better place to put it.

Also available on pastie.

Example usage, using the to_xml example:

Note: this only works if the classes of the nested objects are canonically named. If any of your associations use the :class_name option, you will probably need to update this code to discover the proper class names.

I just wrote this a couple hours ago, so please consider this to be an alpha version.