Using ";action" from ActiveResource client

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a RESTful Rails (1.2.3) app which implements XML operations. I'm now writing a client side (non-Rails) app to interact with it. The client side has activeresource and activesupport, both taken from SVN trunk.

I have basic ActiveResource REST fetches working OK:

    unit = Unit.find(1) # GET /units/1.xml     unit = Unit.find(:all, :params => { :foo => "bar" }) # GET /units.xml?foo=bar

Now, my problem is how to invoke named controller actions such as ;baz

    unit = Unit.find(1, ??WHAT GOES HERE??) # GET /units/1.xml;baz

On the Rails server side, the corresponding route is

  map.resources :units, :member => {     :baz => :get,   }

and this part is working fine, e.g. I can point a browser to http://localhost:8000/units/1.xml;baz and get the expected result. So my only problem is how to get ActiveResource to issue this query in the first place.

I have tried

    Unit.find(1, :from => "/units/1.xml;baz")

but tcpdump shows that it is only sending "GET /units/1.xml".

So any ideas how to do this?

Alternatively: I could change my Rails application to accept /units/1/baz.xml as the request format. I think this ought to be possible, as implied by the following example in the ActiveResource source code:

      # Person.find(:one, :from => "/companies/1/manager.xml") # => GET /companies/1/manager.xml

However, how would I configure routing in the Rails app to accept a request in this format? At the moment, a request to /units/1/baz gives a 404.

I have the Agile book v2, and it shows how to do nested routes, but IIUC that would be       /companies/1/managers       /companies/1/managers/1 and not       /companies/1/manager

Perhaps there is a way to declare a single resource rather than a collection in a mapping?

In any case, if I have to change my app to work this way, doesn't that make the ";xxx" member actions superfluous?

Thanks,

Brian.

2

OK, I solved the first part of this question. It works if I do find(:all) not find(1), i.e.

    Unit.find(:all, :from => "/units/1.xml;baz")

It wasn't exactly that simple. The ;baz controller actually returns a collection of a different object type: <settings><setting>...</

</settings>. This confuses ARes, which was expecting

<units><unit>...</unit></units>. So actually what I have to write is

    Setting.find(:all, :from => "/units/1.xml;baz")

But I can cope with that.

I'd still be interested in an answer to the other part of my question though, which is not to do with ARes but Rails. If I want a RESTful controller to respond to /things/1/foo[.xml], how do I configure the routing to do that?

The ARes docs and unit tests imply that this is an expected scenario:

...     david = Person.find(:one, :from => "/companies/1/manager.xml")     assert_equal "David", david.name

Thanks,

Brian.

3

FYI, after digging around in subversion, it seems that in Edge Rails the format of REST URLs has changed, from /foo/1.xml;action to /foo/1/ action.xml

Also, this new format is supported by ActiveResource in lib/ active_resource/custom_methods.rb, so you can issue queries like

    settings = Unit.new(:id => '1').get(:baz)

(although in this case I get back a straight array of hashes, not Setting objects). So now I need to decide whether to live life on The Edge :slight_smile: