You are slightly misunderstanding what :type does within Grape::Entity. It does not refer to the class that is being exposed, but an option that you pass on the call to present. It is probably not suitable for your purpose, unless you always know the class of objects you are sending to present (I am guessing that may not always be the case and you have some polymorphism here).
I think you just want this:
class VehicleDetails < Grape::Entity
expose :id
expose :name
expose :type
expose :health
end
Grape::Entity will try a property and fail gracefully if it is not available or raises an error.
If other classes that you want to use do have the health property, but you want to hide those values, you can use the block form of expose:
class VehicleDetails < Grape::Entity
expose :id
expose :name
expose :type
expose( :health ) do |vehicle,opts|
vehicle.is_a?( Basis ) ? vehicle.health : nil
end
end
Or you can pass a Ruby Proc as the condition:
class VehicleDetails < Grape::Entity
expose :id
expose :name
expose :type
expose :health, :if => Proc.new {|vehicle| vehicle.is_a?( Basis )}
end
This last one may be better if you don't want to show existing health property at all for classes which have it other than Basis