RESTful messaging. Trying to put it together and it feels unclean.

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm putting together a quick little app just to do some messaging between users. I'm trying to do it restfully but what I have feels kind of unclean.

Here's what I have:

Models:         User has_many :messages         Message belongs_to :user ; belongs_to :msgcontent         Msgcontent has_many :messages          Message is a join model between User and Msgcontent. In addition to containing references to User and Msgcontent, it also has a "status" field indicating whether a given user has read or deleted the message. This is the only reason for the join model. It saves having to have the same content for a message replicated multiple times in the database.

Controllers:         UsersController         SessionsController         MessagesController

The UsersController and SessionsController come from the restful_authentication plugin. Note that there is _no_ MsgcontentsController.

The intent is to have the following urls, but it feels dirty since it's mixing the Message and Msgcontent models together in the MessagesController. It does leave the url space fairly clean.

      * GET /messages # retrieves messages & msgcontent for current         user       * POST /messages # creates single msgcontent and a message for         each recipient       * GET /messages/1 # retrieves message 1 and related msgcontent       * PUT /messages/1 # updates the status of message 1 (read/unread         status)       * DELETE /messages/1 # deletes message 1 and if no more references         to related msgcontent, removes that as well.       * GET /messages/new # form containing info for _msgcontent_       * GET /messages/1/edit # possible form for _message_ to update         status

I'm looking for alternate ways to solve this type of solution. Or is this how it would be done?

2

Hi Kad,

> > Here's what I have: > > Models: > User has_many :messages > Message belongs_to :user ; belongs_to :msgcontent > Msgcontent has_many :messages

Hi Rick I am currentlt trying to solve the same problem in my app... I don't understand your model... I believe the msg content is part of your message (as the subject) you should also have senders and receivers ?...

The goal was to have only a single copy of a message and have multiple recipients have pointers to that single message. In this case the single message would be Msgcontent and the reference to the message would be Message.

I'm thinking this may be a premature optomization on my part. As long as the messages are small, each recipient can have a copy of it. It simplifies the models and controllers (basically the structure you outlined in your message).

Thanks for the reality check. :slight_smile:

presently my pending problem is how to write a route to send a message to a specific user (from 5 to 25 for example)..

something like users/5/messages/25;send in this case I get the correct parameters, but also an error... I should add a member in the routes ?

You should just be able to do a POST to /users/25/messages (assuming you're doing some sort of authentication and have a current_user object) and this would create a new message for User 25 (with the sender being the current_user)