Manual route redundancy with .:format (REST from scratch)

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am building an RESTful search application in Rails. Unfortunately I can't take advantage of map.resources routing because the application has no models (it communicates with a SOAP service). So I am building a REST architecture from scratch.

I have 5 custom routes to emulate RESTful nesting of resources. However, I have to duplicate every entry to be able to catch whether or not the resource is requested with a format. So I have to have 10 route entries...

map.connect 'parent/:parentid/child/:childid.:format',     :controller => 'child',     :action => 'show',     :conditions => {:method => :get}

map.connect 'parent/:parentid/child/:childid',     :controller => 'child',     :action => 'show',     :conditions => {:method => :get}

...

Does anybody have any suggestions on how I can set this up so I don't repeat myself?

Cheers, Stephanie

2

map.resources is not tightly bound to models (or the naming convention for controllers, as it happens)

map.resources :wibbles, :controller => 'something_arbitrary'

your something_arbitrary_controller.rb can do whatever it wants - it's *your* code.

HTH, Trevor

3

Thanks for the reply. I used map.resources and it worked fine until I began nesting my resources. The syntax for nesting map.resources does not seem to work without models. The issue I have with map.resources is it creates several routes which aren't applicable to my application. For instance, I have a few controllers which should only be accessible with a GET since they are results from a web service. The POST, PUT, DELETE + new and edit are not needed.

-Stephanie

4

stephanie wrote:

Thanks for the reply. I used map.resources and it worked fine until I began nesting my resources. The syntax for nesting map.resources does not seem to work without models. The issue I have with map.resources is it creates several routes which aren't applicable to my application. For instance, I have a few controllers which should only be accessible with a GET since they are results from a web service. The POST, PUT, DELETE + new and edit are not needed.

I'm curious why this would be a problem? If you don't define the corresponding methods in your controller you should be fine? Or am I missing something?

5

Thanks for the reply. I used map.resources and it worked fine until I began nesting my resources. The syntax for nesting map.resources does not seem to work without models. The issue I have with map.resources

I'm not sure how it wouldn't work without models - as I said, map.resources has nothing to do with models really.

I'll hazard a guess tho: is it something like you want /foo (foo_controller) and /foo/bar (bar_controller)? If that's what you're talking about, then /foo is a map.resource (note the singular).

So unless what I've said above (or what *you* said below) explains why it doesn't work for you, maybe you could expand on this a bit?

is it creates several routes which aren't applicable to my application. For instance, I have a few controllers which should only be accessible with a GET since they are results from a web service. The POST, PUT, DELETE + new and edit are not needed.

Yeah, I can understand why you wouldn't want them. I guess it's a tradeoff between the convenience of map.resources with a controller that only has index/show methods vs the extra (and un-used) routes and url helpers.

If the extra routes and helpers really offend you then you could whip up a little helper or two that generates routes the way you want - after all, that's what map.resources is (see resources.rb in the rails source).

HTH, Trevor

6

Thanks, this discussion has been really helpful.

I am not sure why it didn't work when I nested it. Perhaps it has to do with mapping associations in the resources.rb. It was awhile ago, so there might have been singular issue. At this point I think I've decided I want to implement my own routes. I might refer to resources.rb to create my own helper.

Rails map.resources is a great template for how I'd want to do RESTful routes 95% of the time. However, there are times when the conventions breakdown for a particular resource-oriented service.

-Stephanie