i'm working with a has_many :through association. a person has many people through connections.
connection is the join model. the first step for the UI was to only allow the creation of one connection at a time. I would show a primary person and a list of possible connections with radio buttons. the user would choose only one and hit submit. that's clearly restful: a POST to the create method in the ConnectionsController.
now, however, i'd like to allow users to create more than one connection at a time. the app will present a checkbox list of possible connections and the user can create many connections with one submit.
Now the RESTful vision gets muddy for me.
I started writing a bulk_create method in my ConnectionsController, but the controller started to feel less pure.
What should I do?
1. add a bulk_create method and have it loop through the array of people do many POSTs to the original create method? or 2. add a bulk_create method and have it work directly to the Connection model? or 3. add a new array parameter to the orig create method so that a POST would create many new connections at once.
or is there another option? none of these feel like ideal. i'm guessing this is a pattern that folks have encountered. but I didn't have much luck searching around.
-b