Preferred way to disable parts of a RESTful resource?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all -

I've got my RESTful resource all setup. However, there is no editing or destroying allowed. What's the preferred way to disable those?

- remove the action? (don't like this idea) - redirect within the action skipping the actual edit/destroy call? - returning an error? (is there a standard here?)

Thanks!

-philip

2

remove the action (method) from the controller. if you don't want code to be executed, don't provide the code to execute.

3

def edit    render '404.html' end

def destroy    render '404.html' end

4

remove the action (method) from the controller. if you don't want code to be executed, don't provide the code to execute.

The drawback to this is that a RESTful client isn't going to get any
notification about why those actions/verbs don't work. It would be
nice to provide an error message of some sort "This functionality is
intentionally not enabled...." or something.

Doesn't look like there is a preferred way so I'll just roll my own.

Thanks for everyone's replies.

5

Hi,

According to the HTTP specs, when a particular request method isn't supported for a resource identified by a URI, server should return 405 HTTP code.

Wojtek

6

Aloha Philip,

We use:

  def delete     respond_to do |format|       format.html raise(:method_not_allowed)       format.xml {render :xml=>exception, :status=>405}     end   end

for any methods that aren't allowed. As Wojtek said, you are supposed to return a 405 on items that aren't allowed not a 404.

Best of luck,

DrMark