Enable flag on exposures to optionally exlcude nil attributes.

[idyll]

For certain APIs I find that it is best for the client if the API hide's attributes that are nil.

Instead of handling this in each serializer (json, plist, xml) I am looking for options to pull control over this into the entity.

[idyll]

@dblock or @mbleigh can you give me your thoughts on this. I am trying to think of an easy way to check the value of an attribute and hide it if it is nil.

I am really undecided at this point if this should be an option at the entity level or at the individual exposure level.

Either way, I think conditions_met should accept the attribute. Eventually I think we should pass it to the proc with the object but I think this is a breaking change because existing procs won't be able to handle it.

[SegFaultAX]

I think this is a pretty cool feature, and I definitely think it should be on a per-exposure basis. If you have a host of nullable exposures, you can use the new #with_options method that @mbleigh added recently to share that configuration easily while keeping the entity definition DRY. +1

[mbleigh]

I like the feature, and also agree that it should be per-exposure. There are some attributes that you may want to expose as null even if others aren't. Make it per-exposure and I'd say it's good to merge!

[mbleigh]

Note I'm not 100% if the current implementation is per-exposure, but it seems like the specs at least could use a bit more descriptive of names.

[idyll]

I agree. The naming is bad. This was intended to talk about, I wasn't planning to merge until I cleanup the specs and make sure i've covered what I need to.

The current implementation should be per-exposure.

[dblock]

Bump. What do we want to do about this one? If anything it needs a line in CHANGELOG :)

[idyll]

I need to fix it. I am just getting back into this now after some craziness.

[dblock]

In the spirit of staying positive, I think this should be renamed to expose_nil, which would default to true.

Note that exclude_nil can be implemented today with an if.

[idyll]

Okay, I should have time towards the end of the week to fix this. I am going to fix the implementation and I like the expose_nil wording.

[xurde]

So was this finally implemented?
I cant see anything about this on the Docs.

Thanks.

[dblock]

This hasn't been merged, see discussion above. Need more work (from @idyll or others).

[xurde]

Thanks @dblock
In the meanwhile just found this workaround that needs to be applied to every field.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21950613/grape-entities-conditional-expose-if-field-is-not-nil

Hope it help.
Cheers

[idyll]

I am closing this and will reopen a new one with my changes,

[aj0strow]

Was this ever re-opened in another issue? Would be a nice feature for with_options with infrequent relations.

with_options(expose_nil: false) do expose :snow_route expose :temporary_route expose :construction_warning end