All the tutorials I see on doing a rest interface with rails only show how to do it with resources 1 level deep, i.e., they don't show a good way to go about doing a rest interface for nested type rest interfaces. For example:
service.com/api/user/1/company/2
If I was doing this with rails would I have to use 2 different controllers: users_controller & companies_controller?
Are there any good guides for this?
Thanks
Probably, and you can use nested routes like this:
map.resources :users do |users| users.resources :companies end
aurélien
Yes, I would use two controllers. The users_controller would look like a normal RESTful controller. The companies_controller requires a little more work. I tend to do most of it with before_filters
class CompaniesController < ApplicationController
before_filter :find_user before_filter :find_companies, :only => :index before_filter :find_company, :only => [:show,:update,:edit,:destroy]
protected
def find_user @user = User.find_by_id(params[:user_id]) end
def find_companies @companies = @user.companies end
def find_company @company = @user.companies.find_by_id(params[:id]) end
public
def index ....
For the new/create actions, you should use: @company = @user.companies.build(params[:company])
Which makes the new company belong to the @user and (I think) updates any counter cache you might be using. Your company_path now takes two arguements, @user and @company; the companies_path takes @user.
Those methods are the bare minimum, and in a real application, I would probably have something to redirect to a 404 if a user or company wasn't found.
In your routes, you will need a declaration as aurélien said.
Depending on the nature of the application, you might want to substitute the @user in the build statement for something representing the currently logged in user. Something similar could be done in a filter method so that the searches for the update, edit, destroy actions only find companies belonging to the current user.
Hope this helps, Jonathan