Slightly old question, but I fought with this myself today, and here's the answer I came up with: I believe this is slightly jQuery's fault, but that it's only doing what is natural to it. I do, however, have a workaround.
Given the following jQuery ajax call:
$.ajax({
type : "POST",
url : 'http:
dataType: 'json',
data : {"shared_items": [{"entity_id":"253","position":1},{"entity_id":"823","position":2}]}
});
The values jQuery will post will look something like this (if you look at the Request in your Firebug-of-choice) will give you form data that looks like:
shared_items%5B0%5D%5Bentity_id%5D:1
shared_items%5B0%5D%5Bposition%5D:1
If you CGI.unencode that you'll get
shared_items[0][entity_id]:1
shared_items[0][position]:1
I believe this is because jQuery thinks that those keys in your JSON are form element names, and that it should treat them as if you had a field named "user[name]".
So they come into your Rails app, Rails sees the brackets, and constructs a hash to hold the innermost key of the field name (the "1" that jQuery "helpfully" added).
Anyway, I got around this behavior by constructing my ajax call the following way;
$.ajax({
type : "POST",
url : 'http:
dataType: 'json',
data : {"data": JSON.stringify({"shared_items": [{"entity_id":"253","position":1},{"entity_id":"823","position":2}])},
}
});
Which forces jQuery to think that this JSON is a value that you want to pass, entirely, and not a Javascript object it must take and turn all the keys into form field names.
However, that means things are a little different on the Rails side, because you need to explicitly decode the JSON in params[:data].
But that's OK:
ActiveSupport::JSON.decode( params[:data] )
TL;DR: So, the solution is: in the data parameter to your jQuery.ajax() call, do {"data": JSON.stringify(my_object) }
explicitly, instead of feeding the JSON array into jQuery (where it guesses wrongly what you want to do with it.