I just committed my first new Rails feature in months: Autoloading ActiveResource schemas. Note: this is in my personal fork that's up to date with the rails repo, and will probably be merged in for Rails 2.3.

I've received some requests for this from people having problems using Lighthouse::Ticket records with form_for helpers in their Rails apps. The idea is that resources can automatically load the starting XML just once, like the way ActiveRecord loads the schema from the database. This is already part of the current Rails scaffolding:

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @post = Post.new
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # new.html.erb
      format.xml { render :xml => @post }
    end
  end
end

There is one problem though, this probably won't work for protected or nested actions. Ideally a Rails app will set a top level route for the resource, and disable any before filters if request.format.xml? is true.

map.route 'tickets/new.:format', :controller => 'tickets', :action => 'new'

You can get around this by modifying the #schema hash directly, or calling #reset_schema with your own prefixes. Here's a sample using the Lighthouse API lib.

Lighthouse.account = 'entp'
Lighthouse.token = 'monkey'
Lighthouse::Ticket.reset_schema :project_id => 1

# or, use a well known public project
Lighthouse.account = 'rails'
Lighthouse::Ticket.reset_schema :project_id => 8994
Ticket.new # => #<Lighthouse::Ticket:0x1707898 @attributes={"permalink"=>nil, "updated_at"=>nil, "number"=>nil, "title"=>nil, "creator_id"=>nil, "tag"=>nil, "attachments_count"=>0, "priority"=>0, "closed"=>false, "assigned_user_id"=>nil, "user_id"=>nil, "created_at"=>nil, "state"=>nil, "milestone_id"=>nil}, @prefix_options={:project_id=>8994}>

Update: I feel like this is more appropriate on Riding Rails, so I cross posted there to get additional feedback.