Best way to map fields between rails product and an api client product

Hi,

I am working on building an api client for the Rakuten MarketPlace. I
have
got some test requests for add delete update etc working and thought I
should aim to structure it as a Gem and publish it so that others can
use
it/enhance it.

I havn’t built a Gem before (worked mostly within the rails environment
to
date).

Have been reading and looking at other api client gems and am making
progress on building something (still got a way to go to handle errors
etc.)

To make the gem general purpose though, I am trying to figure out the
best
way to provide the mapping between models in a rails app and the api
client objects (such as product, category, order etc).

I am aiming to make each client api object a class be (or should i call
them models?)
Then I suspect I will use new to build an api instance from a rails
instance, and find to return an api instance to a rails instance.

i can build in mapping for my own models to the api objects with no
problem, but I can’t see how I could generalize this so that other apps
with similar models could use the gem.

I suspect there are approaches for doing this, but so far I haven’t
managed
to come up with how to do it. If anyone has any wisdom on the matter I
would be grateful.

Tony Martin

I’m not completely certain, but I think you might find some insight by
looking at ActiveModel

Thank you for that, I am still building the client gem itself, but you
did
prompt me to look around a bit. Took a look at active resource, and
the
Schema and attributes stuff is going along the path I was looking for.
I
suspect that I might even be able to make ActiveResource work with the
Rakuten RMS API, but at the moment I am content to lift some bits from
ActiveResource, which should also give me the info I need to make the
errors stuff rails consistent.

I am still not sure how I am going to map from Rails models to my
Rakuten
client models, but I am getting nearer.

Thanks