First, the desired result

I have User and Item models. I'd like to build a JSON response that looks like this:

{
  "user":
    {"username":"Bob!","foo":"whatever","bar":"hello!"},

  "items": [
    {"id":1, "name":"one", "zim":"planet", "gir":"earth"},
    {"id":2, "name":"two", "zim":"planet", "gir":"mars"}
  ]
}

However, my User and Item model have more attributes than just those. I found a way to get this to work, but beware, it's not pretty... Please help...

Update

The next section contains the original question. The last section shows the new solution.

My hacks

home_controller.rb

class HomeController < ApplicationController

  def observe
    respond_to do |format|
      format.js { render :json => Observation.new(current_user, @items).to_json }
    end
  end

end

observation.rb

# NOTE: this is not a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base
# this class just serves as a container to aggregate all "observable" objects
class Observation
  attr_accessor :user, :items

  def initialize(user, items)
    self.user = user
    self.items = items
  end

  # The JSON needs to be decoded before it's sent to the `to_json` method in the home_controller otherwise the JSON will be escaped...
  # What a mess!
  def to_json
    {
      :user => ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(user.to_json(:only => :username, :methods => [:foo, :bar])),
      :items => ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(auctions.to_json(:only => [:id, :name], :methods => [:zim, :gir]))
    }
  end
end

Look Ma! No more hacks!

Override as_json instead

The ActiveRecord::Serialization#as_json docs are pretty sparse. Here's the brief: