REST seems goood, accept for one thing...

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

After having been given som references concerining this hip new REST thing (thanks Mathieu) it seems that REST, especially the nested resources bit, is for me. I am trying to develop a membership administration application specifi for my sport, so I really like the idea of being able to "enter" a club and doing everything in the context of that club in an explicit way (i.e. not setting a session variable and all that).

This means, of course, that a member is a member of a club. This is all very good for most situations, however, I would like to develop a statistics module for the entire organization (i.e. all clubs). Now, since members is only used within a club, it seems that this would mean iterating through al clubs, joining the membership lists, resorting them and THEN begin to dispay statistics. Seems very un-rails-like.

The suggested solution I can come up with is to have a new model organisation to which all clubs belong and has a has_many - relationship with members, through clubs. Then, have a nested resource where members is in organisation (whith an id which is always 1).

Would this work? Are there potential conflicts involved in having multiple nested routes with the same resource?

I'm not really a strong enough Rails developer for this :slight_smile: so I appreciate all the help I can get !

/Fredrik

2

what kind of statistics do you want to provide? Will something like the following not work?

map.resources :clubs, :collection => { :statistics => :any }

class Club < AR::Base   has_many :members end

class Member < AR::Base   belongs_to :club end

class ClubsController < ApplicationController   # GET /clubs/statistics   def statistics      @clubs = Club.find(:all, :include => :members, :order => 'name')   end end

clubs/statistics.rhtml

<% for club in @clubs -%> Name: <%= club.name %> Number of members: <%= club.members.length %> ... etc <% end -%>

3

The simplest approach may be a named route. In your routes.rb you would add:

map.statistics '/ statistics', :controller=>'members', :action=>'statistics'

That named route would allow you to put something like this in a view:

<%= link_to 'statistics', :url=>statistics_url, ... %>

Then your controller would:

class MembersController < ApplicationController   def statistics     @members = Member.find(:all, -- your statistics criteria here --)     ... your additional manipulation here ...

    respond_to ...     end   end end

Note that the method in question knows that it deals with all members generally, not that subset of members belonging to a particular club.

There are a few other options available as well. One would be to have both a nested and non-nested map.resources statement in your routes.rb for the members. I'd shy away from this as it could get messy and the url would not be 'pretty' (IMO).

Another would be to create a new _controller_. A point that many people miss is that a resource need not have a 1-for-1 correlation to a model. It could be a subset of the model attributes or a combination of two or more resources. What's important is that a resource be addressable and respond to a certain set of requests. With that in mind you could consider a 'statistic' resource to be the cumulative totals for a member, the name of the member that compiled them, and the club for which that member plays. Your StatisticsController#index would retrieve those in whatever way made the most sense (probably Member.find(:all, :include=>:club, ...)). Taking that approach you get a pretty url and a view/controller dedicated to statistics rendering (very clear separation of concerns).

HTH, AndyV