On a recent project we served up a flash/flex based client from a Rails app. The flash client needed to call back into the app to retrieve xml to populate some displays. Nice. Rails is good that way, especially if you have started from scaffolded resources which have all the format.xml responders already in them.

Unfortunately the dashes that rails ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Array::Conversions uses
(same goes for AS::CE::Hash::) takes the model attribute names and puts dashes into them
to create the xml tags.

So if you have a User model with user_name attribute and you just want to return
@user.to_xml, you are going to get 

   <user>
      <user-name>value of name</user-name>
   </user>

Which looks pretty. But apparently the xml parser in flex can’t handle that. I couldn’t find any reference in the documentation on how to fix this, but when in doubt UTSL, baby. Which shows that there is a :dasherize option that can be provided.

  @user = User.find(params[:id])
  @user.to_xml(:dasherize => false)

Now the generated xml will have underscores instead of dashes. Flex developers everywhere should send DHH a nickel for that one. Ok, I don’t know who made the actual commit for it, but you’s should give David the nickel anyway.