REST - Nested Resources

rubyonrails-talk
21

1) Yes, you can have your resource appear in the resource map as many times as you like. Just a word of warning, though. The more times that it appears in the map, the more complex your controller can/will become; you'll have to be prepared to handle a request from ANY of those paths. You may limit the footprint through your UI but that could be circumvented by the person who's watching your pretty URLs.

2) Yes, you can pass multiple parameters. For an oversimplified example, think about the update path. You've probably got at least as many parameters as columns getting posted with each update request. In your case you might have several UI's related to them that make them appear to be a "Complete the milestone" and a "Create the milestone" or a "Fix an error in the milestone" path, but they're all fundamentally updates coming with potentially different set of "filters".

The key point with REST is that you have a resource at a known address that responds in a known way, setting or getting state, each time to call it on that address. In this case, you milestones#index is going to respond with a list of milestones every single time. In some cases it's the complete list (not nested), in some cases it's a list bound by a user, and in other cases it's further filtered (or sorted...) based on the parameters you send up. The big deal, though is that it's always reporting back on the state of the collection.

3) Obie's is the best overall source I've read so far. I have not yet seen the Agile 3ed that's out in Beta but I'd bet it has a fair covering of it, too. Rails Advanced Recipes is a good resource but it's not specifically devoted to REST.

22

AndyV wrote:

1) Yes, you can have your resource appear in the resource map as many times as you like. Just a word of warning, though. The more times that it appears in the map, the more complex your controller can/will become; you'll have to be prepared to handle a request from ANY of those paths. You may limit the footprint through your UI but that could be circumvented by the person who's watching your pretty URLs.

<snip> Thanks Andy - this is has helped me a lot :wink:

23

Can anybody tell me how I can use a login instead of id in my route?

/users/chuck/locations/

Can that be generated by a regular nested route identifier like users_locations_path?

Thanks,

Chuck

24

@Chuck: You need to override the to_param method in your User class

class User has_many :locations

def to_param   username end end

then in controller

User.find_by_username(params[:id])

in views <%= link_to @user, 'test' %> results in <a href="/users/chuck">test</

you can definitely use a regex in your routes to restrict what is captured, but its not necessary for it to work.