So I've recently started playing with the restful routes support in edge rails, converting a few of my controllers to support all the standard operations.. One thing that's been bothering me, however, is the following:
Before using restul routes, I would define an edit method in my controller which would be responsible for both creating new objects as well as editing pre-existing objects (if, for example, an id was passed as a parameter).. The form would postback to the same edit action in the controller, which would then update the attributes of the object and save them back to the database. This worked out pretty well, since both the edit and new actions would use the same view, and I didn't have to duplicate code, since edit and new are so similar.
Now, when moving to restful routes, it looks like edit and new should be completely different actions (create and update), but they still have very similar behaviour. So now we're forced to use two views whereas before I could get away with one.. I've managed to avoid duplicating my views by using a partial for the actual form data, and then rendering this partial from both my create an update actions.. However, I'm just wondering how everyone else is handling the code in the controller. Are you keeping both update and create completely separate, or writing another method that you call from both create and update to perform the tasks common to both actions?
I really like the idea of restful routes, but I'm having a hard time adjusting from my old habits, especially when it seems like I'll be writing more code than before, and duplicating things that used to be easy to combine. I liked the fact that I used to be able to both edit and create new objects from a single action, so it's a bit strange for me to have to separate these methods.
Also, another thing that has been concerning me is that often I'll have both an administrative view and a regular user view for an object.. For example, I may have a list of contests that are displayed publicly to all users via the index action in the contests_controller, but I also want to display another (condensed) index listing for administrators inside an adminstrative section. How does everyone normally handle this situation? Do you do define a non-standard restful route such as the following:
map.resources :contests, :collection => { :list => :get}
or do you specify a regular route as follows:
map.with_options(:controller => 'contests') do | contest | contest. contest_list 'contests/list', :action => 'list'
Or do you simply use the same index view for both admin and regular users, but add conditional statements in the view to display a different listing if the user is an administrator? (this isn't really ideal, since I do want administrators to see the same index as regular users, but when they're in the admin section of the site, I want them to see the administrative display of the contests).
I used to just define an extra action (such as list_contests) in my admin_controller, which would display the admin view for the given object. But it seems to make more sense to put all of these things into the same controller, so for example, the contests_controller is responsible for all access to contest objects.
What I'm trying to understand is how to best handle all the non CRUD related actions that I sometimes have associated with a controller. Is it best to use a mapped resource, or to use a standard route..
Thanks for any suggestions or advice,
Mike