Ruby JSON issue - ruby

Question

I know the title is a bit vague, but I dont know what to put on there.
I'm developing an API with Sinatra for our backend in Ruby. The thing is that I need to be able to pass JSON to the service representing a User. The problem I'm facing is that when I run my tests it does not work, but doing it manually against the service it does work. I'm guessing there is an issue with the JSON format.
I've updated my User model to rely on the helpers from ActiveModel for the JSON serialization. I was running in too much problems with manual conversions. This is what the base User model looks like:
class User
include ActiveModel::Serializers::JSON
attr_accessor :login, :email, :birthday, :created_at, :updated_at, :password_sha, :password_salt
# Creates a new instance of the class using the information stored
# in the hash. If data is missing then nill will be assigned to the
# corresponding property.
def initialize(params = {})
return if params.nil?
self.login = params[:login] if params.key?("login")
self.email = params[:email] if params.key?("email")
self.birthday = Time.parse(params[:birthday]) rescue Time.now
if params.key?("password_salt") && params.key?("password_sha")
self.password_salt = params["password_salt"]
self.password_sha = params["password_sha"]
elsif params.key?("password")
self.set_password(params[:password])
end
self.created_at = Time.now
end
def attributes
{:login => self.login, :email => self.email, :birthday => self.birthday, :created_at => self.created_at, :updated_at => self.updated_at, :password_sha => self.password_sha, :password_salt => self.password_salt}
end
def attributes=(params = {})
self.login = params['login']
self.email = params['email']
self.birthday = params['birthday']
self.created_at = params['created_at']
self.updated_at = params['updated_at']
self.password_sha = params['password_sha']
self.password_salt = params['password_salt']
end
end
I'm using Cucumber, Rack::Test and Capybara to test my API implementation.
The code of the API application looks like this:
# This action will respond to POST request on the /users URI,
# and is responsible for creating a User in the various systems.
post '/users' do
begin
user = User.new.from_json(request.body.read)
201
rescue
400
end
end
In the above piece I expect the json representation in the request body. For some reason the params hash is empty here, don't know why
The test section that makes the actuall post looks like this:
When /^I send a POST request to "([^\"]*)" with the following:$/ do |path, body|
post path, User.new(body.hashes.first).to_json, "CONTENT_TYPE" => "application/json"
end
The example output JSON string generated by the User.rb file looks like this:
"{"user":{"birthday":"1985-02-14T00:00:00+01:00","created_at":"2012-03-23T12:54:11+01:00","email":"arne.de.herdt#gmail.com","login":"airslash","password_salt":"x9fOmBOt","password_sha":"2d3afc55aee8d97cc63b3d4c985040d35147a4a1d312e6450ebee05edcb8e037","updated_at":null}}"
The output is copied from the Rubymine IDE, but when I submit this to the application, I cannot parse it because:
The params hash is empty when using the tests
doing it manually gives me the error about needing at least 2 octets.