DRY property declaration about oat

[ismasan]

This goes slightly against the grain of what I originally set out to do with Oat, in that I wanted serializers to be as explicit as possible in their definition even if that means some duplication. The reason was that serializers should define a clear boundary between your model layer and your app's public HTTP API.

However, I can see how a more automatic mapping from "item" to "schema" attributes can be practical in some cases.

I'm not sure I would overload the properties and property methods to have the extra behaviour, as those methods are meant to be simple to understand and explicit in what the value is. Maybe we could add a separate method whose name describes the behaviour? For example map_properties (or something better, maybe just map). So your serializers would show a clear distinction between the definitions where you explicitly set the value and those where you just want to map them straight from the item.

class UserSerializer < ApplicationSerializer
  schema do
    map_properties :id, :email, :name, :created_at, :updated_at
    property :age, item.years_old
    property :psychic, item.psychic?
    properties do |p|
      p.active item.active?
    end
  end
end

Does that make sense?

[shekibobo]

Yeah, I actually like #map_properties a lot. Much clearer, and it lets us define it on the serializer to work for all adapters.