HTTP POST of XML

I am new to Rails so hopefully not asking stupid questions, but I would
appreciate any help on the following:

What is the easiest (least hassle) way for my Rails application to
accept XML input? I know that I can use WSDL, but is there any default
or easily modified way to simply do an HTTP POST of the parameters I
want to pass in?

Also, I have tried coding a client to do an HTTP POST of what appeared
to be the parameters to some simple RAILS applications (like recipe from
InstantRails) and it appears that Rails expects a nested name-value
pair - something my client software can’t currently do. Can someone
explain why Rails does this and if there are any work-arounds?

-Mark

Mark W. wrote:

Also, I have tried coding a client to do an HTTP POST of what appeared
to be the parameters to some simple RAILS applications (like recipe from
InstantRails) and it appears that Rails expects a nested name-value
pair ? something my client software can?t currently do. Can someone
explain why Rails does this and if there are any work-arounds?
Rails actually does some magic query-key parsing to make that work. As
long as you can submit key-value pairs with arbitrary keys, you should
be able to get the nested values to work. Something like:

http://rails.app/my/query?val[a]=foo&val[b]=bar

should give you a params array like:

params = {:val =>{:a=>‘foo’, :b=>‘bar’}}

I don’t know if that’s enough to get your client to work, though…

I just wanted to clarify what you are suggesting. If I want to attain
this:

Parameters: {"commit"=>"Create",

“category”=>{“name”=>“Test”},…

I should insert the following pairs of Strings:

"commit", "Create"
"category[name]", "Test"

Is this what you had in mind?

-Mark

Mark W. wrote:

Is this what you had in mind?
Without being precisely sure what you’re inserting to, that looks about
right, yes.