REST and STI: one or many controllers ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all !

I have ContactRoutes subclassed as PhoneContactRoute, AddressContactRoute and so on. Now, I'm thinking about my controllers, and I am wondering if I should be creating a single ContactRoutesController or have many controllers, one per subclass.

What seems to be the general consensus as this time ?

Thanks !

2

Good morning François.

My approach would be to build interfaces based on the model abstraction - not on the specific storage implementation - especially as the subclasses deviate.

If you were to use a single controller, then you'll likely find you'll be passing params to indicate the specific class. With separate controllers you can code the specific sub-class.

This has has the additional bonus if you change your Models (when we get multiple table inheritance) your controller interface will not change.

Cheers, Jodi General Partner The nNovation Group inc. www.nnovation.ca/blog

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3

Hello Jodi,

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Francois Beausoleil wrote:

Hello Jodi,

My approach would be to build interfaces based on the model abstraction - not on the specific storage implementation - especially as the subclasses deviate.      I was leaning towards one controller per subclass, as you indicate. As you said, the specific controllers will know what class to instantiate, as they are responsible for one type only.

Thank you for your time !   

I've gone with one controller for all the classes because in my case there was so much similarity, and it seemed to make sense from the user interface perspective. I had virtually no changes in the controller (beyond being careful about whther I was referring to base_class or class, and not much in the view either (a couple of different partials). Most of the work about what behaviour was allowed and expected was delegated down to the models, with the base_class defining default behaviour and the individual models overriding it if necessary. Worked for me, though I suspect wouldn't be right in every case. Just my $0.02 Chris

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Hi !

I have gone with one controller for each subclass. I think they are different resources. No problem until the next step. I have had some troubles when I have nested resources for each of the subclasses. Consider that there is a has_many association between ContactRoutes and some other class (say widgets, I can follow with a good example, due to my poor level of english )

Which is the best way to make a WidgetController? This will be a nested resource for the two subclasses of ContactRoutes ? I have had troubles with it, in the views, when I want to link_to, back to the named_url of the primary resource. Which will be the best way to make this?.

In my application, I have this:

class Party < AR::B   has_many :contact_routes, :as => :routable end

class ContactRoute < AR::B   belongs_to :routable, :polymorphic => true end

class PhoneContactRoute < ContactRoute end

class AddressContactRoute < ContactRoute end

So essentially, I have phones and addresses that belong to a party. When addressing those resources, I want URLs like this:

/parties/1/phones/37 /parties/1/addresses /parties/1/addresses/25;edit

In my case, I think it will be easier to not fight the flow. I can always refactor common pieces of functionality into a base controller.

Bye !